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THE LAST HARVEST 




Copyright by Mabel Watson 



THE LAST HARVEST 



BY 



JOHN BURROUGHS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

Cbe fttbergibe $regg Cambridge 
1922 



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COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



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CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 

SEP 1 1 1922 

©CI.A681722 



But who is he with modest looks 
And clad in homely russet brown? 

He murmurs near the running brooks 
A music sweeter than their own. 

He is retired as noontide dew, 
Or fountain in a noon-day grove; 

And you must love him, ere to you 
He will seem worthy of your love. 

The outward shows of sky and earth, 
Of hill and valley, he has viewed; 

And impulses of deeper birth 
Have come to him in solitude. 

In common things that round us lie 
Some random truths he can impart — 

The harvest of a quiet eye 

That broods and sleeps on his own heart. 
Wordsworth 



PREFACE 

Most of the papers garnered here were written after 
fourscore years — after the heat and urge of the 
day — and are the fruit of a long life of observation 
and meditation. 

The author's abiding interest in Emerson is 
shown in his close and eager study of the Journals 
during these later years. He hungered for every- 
thing that concerned the Concord Sage, who had 
been one of the most potent influences in his life. 
Although he could discern flies in the Emersonian 
amber, he could not brook slight or indifference 
toward Emerson in the youth of to-day. Whatever 
flaws he himself detected, he well knew that Emer- 
son would always rest secure on the pedestal where 
long ago he placed him. Likewise with Thoreau: 
If shortcomings were to be pointed out in this favor- 
ite, he wished to be the one to do it. And so, before 
taking Thoreau to task for certain inaccuracies, he 
takes Lowell to task for criticizing Thoreau. He 
then proceeds, not without evident satisfaction, to 
call attention to Thoreau's " slips" as an observer 
and reporter of nature; yet in no carping spirit, but, 
as he himself has said: "Not that I love Thoreau 
less, but that I love truth more." 

The " Short Studies in Contrasts," the " Day by 
vii 



PREFACE 

Day'' notes, "Gleanings," and the "Sundown 
Papers " which comprise the latter part of this, the 
last, posthumous volume by John Burroughs, were 
written during the closing months of his life. Con- 
trary to his custom, he wrote these usually in the 
evening, or, less frequently, in the early morning 
hours, when, homesick and far from well, with the 
ceaseless pounding of the Pacific in his ears, and 
though incapable of the sustained attention neces- 
sary for his best work, he was nevertheless impelled 
by an unwonted mental activity to seek expression. 
If the reader misses here some of the charm and 
power of his usual writing, still may he welcome 
this glimpse into what John Burroughs was doing 
and thinking during those last weeks before the ill- 
ness came which forced him to lay aside his pen. 

Clara Barbus 

Woodchuck Lodge 
Roxbury-in-the-Catskills 



CONTENTS 



I. 


Emerson and his Journals 


1 


II. 


Flies in Amber 


86 


III. 


Another Word on Thorbau 


•403 


IV. 


A Critical Glance into Darwin 


172 


V. 


What makes a Poem? 


201 


VI. 


Short Studies in Contrasts: 


218 




The Transient and the Permanent 


218 




Positive and Negative 


219 




Palm and Fist 


220 




Praise and Flattery 


221 




Genius and Talent 


222 




Invention and Discovery 


223 




Town and Country 


226 


VII. 


Day by Day 


230 


VIII. 


Gleanings 


250 


IX. 


Sundown Papers: 


264 




Re-reading Bergson 


264 




Revisions 


266 




Bergson and Telepathy 


267 




Meteoric Men and Planetary Men 


270 




The Daily Papers 


272 




The Alphabet 


275 




The Reds of Literature 


276 




ix 





CONTENTS 

IX. Sundown Papers (continued) 

The Evolution of Evolution 279 

Following One's Bent 280 

Notes on the Psychology of Old Age 281 

Facing the Mystery 285 

Index 



The frontispiece portrait is from a photograph 
by Miss Mabel Watson taken at Pasadena, 
California, shortly before Mr. Burroughs's death 



THE LAST HARVEST 



THE LAST HARVEST 

i 

EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 



Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was 
firmly established during his lifetime by the books 
he gave to the world. His Journals, published 
over a quarter of a century after his death, nearly 
or quite double the bulk of his writing, and while 
they do not rank in literary worth with his earlier 
works, they yet throw much light upon his life 
and character and it is a pleasure to me, in these 
dark and troublesome times, 1 and near the sun- 
down of my life, to go over them and point out in 
some detail their value and significance. 

Emerson was such an important figure in our 
literary history, and in the moral and religious 
development of our people, that attention cannot 
be directed to him too often. He could be entirely 
reconstructed from the unpublished matter which 
he left. Moreover, just to come in contact with 
him in times like ours is stimulating and refresh- 
ing. The younger generation will find that he 
1 Written during the World War. — C. B. 
1 



THE LAST HARVEST 

can do them good if they will pause long enough 
in their mad skirting over the surface of things to 
study him. 

For my own part, a lover of Emerson from early 
manhood, I come back to him in my old age with 
a sad but genuine interest. I do not hope to find 
the Emerson of my youth — the man of daring 
and inspiring affirmation, the great solvent of a 
world of encrusted forms and traditions, which is 
so welcome to a young man — because I am no 
longer a young man. Emerson is the spokesman 
and prophet of youth and of a formative, ideal- 
istic age. His is a voice from the heights which 
are ever bathed in the sunshine of the spirit. I 
find that something one gets from Emerson in 
early life does not leave him when he grows old. 
It is a habit of mind, a test of values, a strengthen- 
ing of one's faith in the essential soundness and 
goodness of creation. He helps to make you feel 
at home in nature, and in your own land and gen- 
eration. He permanently exalts your idea of the 
mission of the poet, of the spiritual value of the 
external world, of the universality of the moral 
law, and of our kinship with the whole of nature. 

There is never any despondency or infirmity of 
faith in Emerson. He is always hopeful and cou- 
rageous, and is an antidote to the pessimism and 
materialism which existing times tend to foster. 
Open anywhere in the Journals or in the Essays 
2 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

and we find the manly and heroic note. He is an 
unconquerable optimist, and says boldly, "Noth- 
ing but God can root out God," and he thinks 
that in time our culture will absorb the hells also. 
He counts "the dear old Devil" among the good 
things which the dear old world holds for him. He 
saw so clearly how good comes out of evil and is in 
the end always triumphant. Were he living in 
our day, he would doubtless find something helpful 
and encouraging to say about the terrific outburst 
of scientific barbarism in Europe. 

It is always stimulating to hear a man ask such 
a question as this, even though he essay no answer 
to it: "Is the world (according to the old doubt) 
to be criticized otherwise than as the best possible 
in the existing system, and the population of the 
world the best that soils, climate, and animals per- 
mit?" 

I note that in 1837 Emerson wrote this about 
the Germans : "I do not draw from them great in- 
fluence. The heroic, the holy, I lack. They are 
contemptuous. They fail in sympathy with hu- 
manity. The voice of nature they bring me to 
hear is not divine, but ghastly, hard, and ironical. 
They do not illuminate me : they do not edify 
me." Is not this the German of to-day ? If Em- 
erson were with us now he would see, as we all see, 
how the age of idealism and spiritual power in 
Germany that gave the world the great composers 
3 



THE LAST HARVEST 

and the great poets and philosophers — Bach, 
Beethoven, Wagner, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, 
Kant, Hegel, and others — has passed and been 
succeeded by the hard, cruel, and sterile age of 
materialism, and the domination of an aggressive 
and conscienceless military spirit. Emerson was 
the poet and prophet of man's moral nature, and 
it is this nature — our finest and highest human 
sensibilities and aspirations toward justice and 
truth — that has been so raided and trampled 
upon by the chief malefactor and world outlaw in 
the present war. 

II 

Men who write Journals are usually men of cer- 
tain marked traits — they are idealists, they love 
solitude rather than society, they are self-conscious, 
and they love to write. At least this seems to be 
true of the men of the past century who left Jour- 
nals of permanent literary worth — Amiel, Emerson, 
and Thoreau. Amiel's Journal has more the char- 
acter of a diary than has Emerson's or Thoreau's, 
though it is also a record of thoughts as well as of 
days. Emerson left more unprinted matter than 
he chose to publish during his lifetime. 

The Journals of Emerson and Thoreau are 
largely made up of left-overs from their published 
works, and hence as literary material, when com- 
pared with their other volumes, are of secondary im- 

4 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

portance. You could not make another " Walden " 
out of Thoreau's Journals, nor build up another 
chapter on "Self -Reliance," or on "Character," or 
on the "Over-Soul," from Emerson's, though there 
are fragments here and there in both that are on a 
level with their best work. 

. Emerson records in 1835 that his brother Charles 
wondered that he did not become sick at the stom- 
ach over his poor Journal : "Yet is obdurate habit 
callous even to contempt. I must scribble on 
..." Charles evidently was not a born scribbler 
like his brother. He was clearly more fond of 
real life and of the society of his fellows. He was 
an orator and could not do himself justice with 
the pen. Men who write Journals, as I have said, 
are usually men of solitary habits, and their Journal 
largely takes the place of social converse. Amiel, 
Emerson, and Thoreau were lonely souls, 
lacking in social gifts, and seeking relief in the 
society of their own thoughts. Such men go to 
their Journals as other men go to their clubs. 
(They love to be alone with themselves, and dread 
to be benumbed or drained of their mental force by 
uncongenial persons.} To such a man his Journal 
becomes his duplicate self and he says to it what he 
could not say to his nearest friend. It becomes 
both an altar and a confessional. Especially is this 
true of deeply religious souls such as the men 
I have named. They commune, through their 

5 



THE LAST HARVEST 

Journals, with the demons that attend them. 
Amiel begins his Journal with the sentence, "There 
is but one thing needful — to possess God," and 
Emerson's Journal in its most characteristic pages 
is always a search after God, or the highest truth. 

"After a day of humiliation and stripes," he 
writes, "if I can write it down, I am straightway 
relieved and can sleep well. After a day of joy, 
the beating heart is calmed again by the diary. 
If grace is given me by all angels and I pray, if 
then I can catch one ejaculation of humility or 
hope and set it down in syllables, devotion is at an 
end." "I write my journal, I deliver my lecture 
with joy," but "at the name of society all my re- 
pulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen." 

He clearly had no genius for social intercourse. 
At the age of thirty he said he had "no skill to live 
with men ; that is, such men as the world is made 
of ; and such as I delight in I seldom find." Again 
he says, aged thirty-two, "I study the art of 
solitude ; I yield me as gracefully as I can to des- 
tiny," and adds that it is "from eternity a settled 
thing" that he and society shall be "nothing to 
each other." He takes to his Journal instead. It 
is his house of refuge. 

Yet he constantly laments how isolated he is, 
mainly by reason of the poverty of his nature, his 
want of social talent, of animal heat, and of sym- 
pathy with the commonplace and the humdrum. 
6 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

" I have no animal spirits, therefore when surprised 
by company and kept in a chair for many hours, 
my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I 
will run for Acton woods and live with the squir- 
rels henceforth." But he does not run away; he 
often takes it out in hoeing in his garden: "My 
good hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, 
and I have less lust to bite my enemies." "In 
smoothing the rough hillocks I smooth my temper. 
In a short time I can hear the bobolinks sing and see 
the blessed deluge of light and color that rolls 
around me." Somewhere he has said that the 
writer should not dig, and yet again and again we 
find him resorting to hoe or spade to help him 
sleep, as well as to smooth his temper : " Yesterday 
afternoon, I stirred the earth about my shrubs and 
trees and quarrelled with the piper-grass, and now 
I have slept, and no longer am morose nor feel 
twitchings in the muscles of my face when a vis- 
itor is by." We welcome these and many another 
bit of self -analysis : "I was born with a seeing eye 
and not a helping hand. I can only comfort my 
friends by thought, and not by love or aid." "I 
was made a hermit and am content with my lot. 
I pluck golden fruit from rare meetings with wise 
men." Margaret Fuller told him he seemed al- 
ways on stilts: "It is even so. Most of the per- 
sons whom I see in my own house I see across a 
gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to me. 

7 



THE LAST HARVEST 

Nothing can exceed the frigidity and labor of my 
speech with such. You might turn a yoke of oxen 
between every pair of words ; and the behavior is 
as awkward and proud." 

" I would have my book read as I have read my 
favorite books, not with explosion and astonish- 
ment, a marvel and a rocket, but a friendly and 
agreeable influence stealing like a scent of a flower, 
or the sight of a new landscape on a traveller. I 
neither wish to be hated and defied by such as I 
startle, nor to be kissed and hugged by the young 
whose thoughts I stimulate." 

Here Emerson did center in himself and never 
apologized. His gospel of self-reliance came nat- 
ural to him. He was emphatically self, without 
a trace of selfishness. He went abroad to study 
himself more than other people — to note the ef- 
fect of Europe on himself. He says, "I believe 
it's sound philosophy that wherever we go, what- 
ever we do, self is the sole object we study and 
learn. Montaigne said himself was all he knew. 
Myself is much more than I know, and yet I know 
nothing else." In Paris he wrote to his brother 
William, "A lecture at the Sorbonne is far less 
useful to me than a lecture that I write myself"; 
and as for the literary society in Paris, though he 
thought longingly of it, yet he said, "Probably in 
years it would avail me nothing." 
8 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

The Journals are mainly a record of his thoughts 
and not of his days, except so far as the days 
brought him ideas. Here and there the personal 
element creeps in — some journey, some bit of 
experience, some visitor, or walks with Channing, 
Hawthorne, Thoreau, Jones Very, and others; 
some lecturing experience, his class meetings, his 
travels abroad and chance meetings with distin- 
guished men. But all the more purely personal 
element makes up but a small portion of the ten 
thick volumes of his Journal. Most readers, I 
fancy, will wish that the proportion of these things 
were greater. We all have thoughts and specula- 
tions of our own, but we can never hear too much 
about a man's real life. 

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and 
essayists of New England, and of English literature 
generally, as of another order. He is a reversion 
to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, 
the poet-seer. He is the poet and prophet of the 
moral ideal. His main significance is religious, 
though nothing could be farther from him than 
creeds and doctrines, and the whole ecclesiastical 
formalism. There is an atmosphere of sanctity 
about him that we do not feel about any other poet 
and essayist of his time. His poems are the fruit 
of Oriental mysticism and bardic fervor grafted 
upon the shrewd, parsimonious, New England 
puritanic stock. The stress and wild, uncertain 
9 



THE LAST HARVEST 

melody of his poetry is like that of the wind-harp. 
No writing surpasses his in the extent to which 
it takes hold of the concrete, the real, the familiar, 
and none surpasses his in its elusive, mystical 
suggestiveness, and its cryptic character. It is 
Yankee wit and shrewdness on one side, and Ori- 
ental devoutness, pantheism, and symbolism on the 
other. Its cheerful and sunny light of the common 
day enhances instead of obscures the light that 
falls from the highest heaven of the spirit. Saadi or 
Hafiz or Omar might have fathered him, but only 
a New England mother could have borne him. 
Probably more than half his poetry escapes the 
average reader; his longer poems - , like "Initial, 
Daemonic, and Celestial Love," "Monadnoc," 
"Merlin," "The Sphinx," "The World-Soul," 
set the mind groping for the invisible rays of the 
spectrum of human thought and knowledge, but 
many of the shorter poems, such as "The Problem," 
"Each and All," "Sea-Shore," "The Snow- 
storm," "Musketaquid," "Days," "Song of Na- 
ture," "My Garden," "Boston Hymn," "Con- 
cord Hymn," and others, are among the most 
precious things in our literature. 

As Emerson was a bard among poets, a seer 
among philosophers, a prophet among essayists, 
an oracle among ethical teachers, so, as I have said, 
was he a solitary among men. He walked alone. 
He somewhere refers to his "porcupine impossi- 
10 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

bility of contact with men." His very thoughts 
are not social among themselves, they separate. 
Each stands alone ; often they hardly have a bow- 
ing acquaintance; over and over their juxtaposi- 
tion is mechanical and not vital. The redeeming 
feature is that they can afford to stand alone, like 
shafts of marble or granite. 

The force and worth of his page is not in its log- 
ical texture, but in the beauty and truth of its iso- 
lated sentences and paragraphs. There is little 
inductive or deductive reasoning in his books, 
but a series of affirmations whose premises and 
logical connection the reader does not always see. 

He records that his hearers found his lectures 
fine and poetical but a little puzzling. "One 
thought them as good as a kaleidoscope." The 
solid men of business said that they did not under- 
stand them but their daughters did. 

The lecture committee in Illinois in 1856 told 
him that the people wanted a hearty laugh. "The 
stout Illinoian," not finding the laugh, "after a 
short trial walks out of the hall." I think even 
his best Eastern audiences were always a good deal 
puzzled. The lecturer never tried to meet them 
halfway. He says himself of one of his lectures, 
"I found when I had finished my new lecture that 
it was a very good house, only the architect had 
unfortunately omitted the stairs." The absence 
of the stairs in his house — of an easy entrance 
11 



THE LAST HARVEST 

into the heart of the subject, and of a few consecu- 
tive and leading ideas — will, in a measure, account 
for the bewilderment of his hearers. When I 
heard Emerson in 1871 before audiences in Bal- 
timore and Washington, I could see and feel this 
uncertainty and bewilderment in his auditors. 

His lectures could not be briefly summarized. 
They had no central thought. You could give a 
sample sentence, but not the one sentence that 
commanded all the others. Whatever he called 
it, his theme, as he himself confesses, was always 
fundamentally the same: "In all my lectures I 
have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude 
cf the private man. This the people accept readily 
enough and even with loud commendations as 
long as I call the lecture Art or Politics, or Litera- 
ture, or the Household, but the moment I call it 
Religion they are shocked, though it be only the 
application of the same truth which they receive 
everywhere else to a new class of facts." 

Emerson's supreme test of a man, after all other 
points had been considered, was the religious test : 
Was he truly religious? Was his pole star the 
moral law? Was the sense of the Infinite ever 
with him? But few contemporary authors met 
his requirements in this respect. After his first 
visit abroad, when he saw Carlyle, Landor, Col- 
eridge, Wordsworth, and others, he said they were 
all second- or third-rate men because of their want 
12 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

of the religious sense. They all looked backward 
to a religion of other ages, and had no faith in a 
present revelation. 

His conception of the divine will as the eternal 
tendency to the good of the whole, active in every atom, 
every moment, is one of the thoughts in which re- 
ligion and science meet and join hands. 

Ill 
In Emerson's Journal one sees the Emersonian 
worlds in their making — the essays, the addresses, 
the poems. Here are the nebulae and star-dust 
out of which most of them came, or in which their 
suggestion lies. Now and then there is quite as 
good stuff as is found in his printed volumes, pages 
and paragraphs from the same high heaven of aes- 
thetic emotion. The poetic fragments and wholes 
are less promising, I think, than the prose; they 
are evidently more experimental, and show the 
'prentice hand more. 

The themes around which his mind revolved all 
his life — nature, God, the soul — and their end- 
less variations and implications, recur again and 
again in each of the ten printed volumes of the 
Journals. He has new thoughts on Character, 
Self-Reliance, Heroism, Manners, Experience, Na- 
ture, Immortality, and scores of other related 
subjects every day, and he presents them in new 
connections and with new images. His mind had 
13 



THE LAST HARVEST 

marked centrality, and fundamental problems 
were always near at hand with him. He could 
not get away from them. He renounced the pul- 
pit and the creeds, not because religion meant less 
to him, but because it meant more. The religious 
sentiment, the feeling of the Infinite, was as the 
sky over his head, and the earth under his feet. 

The whole stream of Emerson's mental life ap- 
parently flowed through his Journals. They were 
the repository of all his thoughts, all his specula- 
tions, all his mental and spiritual experiences. 
What a melange they are ! Wise sayings from his 
wide reading, from intercourse with men, private 
and public, sayings from his farmer neighbors, 
anecdotes, accounts of his travels, or his walks, 
solitary or in the company of Channing, Haw- 
thorne, or Thoreau, his gropings after spiritual 
truths, and a hundred other things, are always 
marked by what he says that Macaulay did not 
possess — elevation of mind — and an abiding 
love for the real values in life and letters. 

Here is the prose origin of "Days" : "The days 
come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent 
from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, 
and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry 
them as silently away." In this brief May entry 
we probably see the inception of the "Humble-Bee" 
poem: "Yesterday in the woods I followed the 
fine humble bee with rhymes and fancies free." 
14 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

Now and then we come upon the germ of other 
poems in his prose. Here is a hint of "Each and 
AH" in a page written at the age of thirty-one: 
"The shepherd or the beggar in his red cloak little 
knows what a charm he gives to the wide landscape 
that charms you on the mountain-top and whereof 
he makes the most agreeable feature, and I no 
more the part my individuality plays in the All." 
The poem, his reader will remember, begins in this 
wise: 

"Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown 
Of thee from the hill-top looking down. " 

In a prose sentence written in 1835 he says : 
"Nothing is beautiful alone. Nothing but is 
beautiful in the whole." In the poem above 
referred to this becomes : 

"All are needed by each one; 
Nothing is fair or good alone." 

In 1856 we find the first stanza of his beautiful 
"Two Rivers," written in prose form: "Thy 
voice is sweet, Musketaquid ; repeats the music 
of the rain ; but sweeter rivers silent flit through 
thee as those through Concord plain." The sub- 
stance of the next four stanzas is in prose form also : 
"Thou art shut in thy banks ; but the stream I love, 
flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and 
through the air, and through darkness, and through 
men, and women. I hear and see the inundation 
and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and 
15 



THE LAST HARVEST 

in summer, in men and animals, in passion and 
thought. Happy are they who can hear it"; and 
so on. In the poem these sentences become : 

"Thou in thy narrow banks are pent : 
The stream I love unbounded goes 
Through flood and sea and firmament; 
Through light, through life, it forward flows. 

" I see the inundation sweet, 
I hear the spending of the stream 
Through years, through men, through Nature fleet, 
Through love and thought, through power and dream." 

It is evident that Emerson was a severe critic 
of his own work. He knew when he had struck 
fire, and he knew when he had failed. He was as 
exacting with himself as with others. His con- 
ception of the character and function of the poet 
was so high that he found the greatest poets want- 
ing. The poet is one of his three or four ever- 
recurring themes. He is the divine man. He is 
bard and prophet, seer and savior. He is the acme 
of human attainment. Verse devoid of insight 
into the method of nature, and devoid of religious 
emotion, was to him but as sounding brass and 
tinkling cymbal. He called Poe "the jingle man" 
because he was a mere conjurer with words. The 
intellectual content of Poe's works was negligible. 
He was a wizard with words and measures, but a 
pauper in ideas. He did not add to our knowl- 
edge, he did not add to our love of anything in 
nature or in life, he did not contribute to our con- 
16 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

tentment in the world — the bread of life was not 
in him. What was in him was mastery over the 
architectonics of verse. Emerson saw little in 
Shelley for the same reason, but much in Herbert 
and Donne. Religion, in his sense of the term, — 
the deep sea into which the streams of all human 
thought empty, — was his final test of any man. 
Unless there was something fundamental about 
him, something that savored of the primordial 
deep of the universal spirit, he remained unmoved. 
The elemental azure of the great bodies of water 
is suggestive of the tone and hue Emerson de- 
manded in great poetry. He found but little of 
it in the men of his time : practically none in the 
contemporary poets of New England. It was prob- 
ably something of this pristine quality that ar- 
rested Emerson's attention in Walt Whitman's 
"Leaves of Grass." He saw in it "the Appala- 
chian enlargement of outline and treatment for 
service to American literature." 

Emerson said of himself : "I am a natural reader, 
and only a writer in the absence of natural writers. 
In a true time I should never have written." We 
must set this statement down to one of those fits 
of dissatisfaction with himself, those negative moods 
that often came upon him. What he meant 
by a true time is very obscure. In an earlier age 
he would doubtless have remained a preacher, like 
his father and grandfather, but coming under the 
17 



THE LAST HARVEST 

influence of Goethe, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, 
and other liberating influences of the nineteenth 
century, he was bound to be a writer. When he 
was but twenty-one he speaks of his immoderate 
fondness for writing. Writing was the passion of his 
life, his supreme joy, and he went through the 
world with the writer's eye and ear and hand al- 
ways on duty. And his contribution to the liter- 
ature of man's higher moral and aesthetic nature 
is one of the most valuable of the age in which he 
lived. 

rv 

Apart from the account of his travels and other 
personal experiences, the Journals are mainly made 
up of discussions of upwards of fifty subjects of 
general and fundamental interest, ranging from art 
to war, and looked at from many and diverse points 
of view. Of these subjects three are dominant, 
recurring again and again in each volume. These 
are nature, literature, and religion. Emerson's 
main interests centered in these themes. Using 
these terms in their broadest sense, this is true, I 
think, of all his published books. Emerson was 
an idealist, first, last, and all the time, and he was 
a literary artist, or aimed to be, first, last, and all 
the time, and in the same measure and to the same 
extent was he a devout religious soul, using the 
term religion as he sometimes uses it, as a feeling 
of the Infinite. 

18 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

There are one hundred and seventy-six para- 
graphs, long and short, given to literature and art, 
and one hundred and sixty given to religious sub- 
jects, and over thirty given to nature. It is in- 
teresting to note that he devotes more paragraphs 
to woman than to man ; and more to society than 
to solitude, though only to express his dislike of 
the former and his love for the latter. There are 
more thoughts about science than about metaphys- 
ics, more about war than about love, more about 
poetry than about philosophy, more on beauty 
than on knowledge, more on walking than on books. 
There are three times as many paragraphs on na- 
ture (thirty-three) as on the Bible, all of which is 
significant of his attitude of mind. 

Emerson was a preacher without a creed, a scholar 
devoted to super-literary ends, an essayist oc- 
cupied with thoughts of God, the soul, nature, the 
moral law — always the literary artist looking for 
the right word, the right image, but always bend- 
ing his art to the service of religious thought. He 
was one of the most religious souls of his country 
and time, or of any country and time, yet was dis- 
owned by all the sects and churches of his time. 
He made religion too pervasive, and too inclusive 
to suit them; the stream at once got out of its 
banks and inundated all their old landmarks. In 
the last analysis of his thought, his ultimate theme 
was God, and yet he never allowed himself to at- 
19 



THE LAST HARVEST 

tempt any definite statement about God — refus- 
ing always to discuss God in terms of human per- 
sonality. When Emerson wrote "Representative 
Men" he felt that Jesus was the Representative 
Man whom he ought to sketch, "but the task re- 
quired great gifts — steadiest insight and perfect 
temper; else the consciousness of want of sympa- 
thy in the audience would make one petulant and 
sore in spite of himself." 

There are few great men in history or philosophy 
or literature or poetry or divinity whose names do 
not appear more or less frequently in the Journals. 
For instance, in the Journal of 1864 the names or 
works of one hundred and seventeen men appear, 
ranging from Zeno to Jones Very. And this is a 
fair average. Of course the names of his friends 
and contemporaries appear the most frequently. 
The name that recurs the most often is that of his 
friend and neighbor Thoreau. There are ninety- 
seven paragraphs in which the Hermit of Wal- 
den is the main or the secondary figure. He dis- 
cusses him and criticizes him, and quotes from 
him, always showing an abiding interest in, and 
affection for, him. Thoreau was in so many ways 
so characteristically Emersonian that one wonders 
what influence it was in the place or time that gave 
them both, with their disparity of ages, so nearly 
the same stamp. Emerson is by far the more 
imposing figure, the broader, the wiser, the more 
20 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

tolerant, the more representative; he stood four- 
square to the world in a sense that Thoreau did 
not. Thoreau presented a pretty thin edge to the 
world. If he stood broadside to anything, it was 
to nature. He was undoubtedly deeply and per- 
manently influenced by Emerson both in his men- 
tal habits and in his manner of life, yet the main 
part of him was original and unadulterated Tho- 
reau. His literary style is in many respects better 
than that of Emerson ; its logical texture is better ; 
it has more continuity, more evolution, it is more 
flexible and adaptive ; it is the medium of a lesser 
mind, but of a mind more thoroughly imbued with 
the influence of the classical standards of modern 
literature. I believe "Walden" will last as long 
as anything Emerson has written, if not longer. 
It is the fruit of a sweeter solitude and detachment 
from the world than Emerson ever knew, a private 
view of nature, and has a fireside and campside 
quality that essays fashioned for the lecture plat- 
form do not have. Emerson's pages are more like 
mosaics, richly inlaid with gems of thought and 
poetry and philosophy, while Thoreau's are more 
like a closely woven, many-colored textile. 

Thoreau's "Maine Woods" I look upon as one 
of the best books of the kind in English literature. 
It has just the right tone and quality, like Dana's 
"Two Years Before the Mast" — a tone and qual- 
ity that sometimes come to a man when he makes 
21 



THE LAST HARVEST 

less effort to write than to see and feel truly. He 
does not aim to exploit the woods, but to live 
with them and possess himself of their spirit. The 
Cape Cod book also has a similar merit ; it almost 
leaves a taste of the salt sea spray upon your lips. 
Emerson criticizes Thoreau freely, and justly, I 
think. As a person he lacked sweetness and win- 
someness ; as a writer he was at times given to a 
meaningless exaggeration. 

Henry Thoreau sends me a paper with the old fault 
of unlimited contradiction. The trick of his rhetoric 
is soon learned : it consists in substituting for the ob- 
vious word and thought its diametrical antagonist. 
He praises wild mountains and winter forests for their 
domestic air ; snow and ice for their warmth ; villagers 
and wood-choppers for their urbanity, and the wilder- 
ness for resembling Rome and Paris. With the con- 
stant inclination to dispraise cities and civilization, he 
yet can find no way to know woods and woodmen ex- 
cept by paralleling them with towns and townsmen. 
Channing declared the piece is excellent : but it makes 
me nervous and wretched to read it, with all its merits. 

I told Henry Thoreau that his freedom is in the form, 
but he does not disclose new matter. I am very fa- 
miliar with all his thoughts, — they are my own quite 
originally drest. But if the question be, what new 
ideas has he thrown into circulation, he has not yet 
told what that is which he was created to say. I said 
to him what I often feel, I only know three persons 
who seem to me fully to see this law of reciprocity or 
compensation — himself, Alcott, and myself : and 't is 
odd that we should all be neighbors, for in the wide 
land or the wide earth I do not know another who 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

seems to have it as deeply and originally as these three 
Gothamites. 

A remark of Emerson's upon Thoreau calls up 
the image of John Muir to me: "If I knew only 
Thoreau, I should think cooperation of good men 
impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and 
never once for truth, for comfort, and joy ? " Then, 
after crediting Thoreau with some admirable gifts, 
— centrality, penetration, strong understanding, — 
he proceeds to say, "all his resources of wit and 
invention are lost to me, in every experiment, 
year after year, that I make to hold intercourse 
with his mind. Always some weary captious 
paradox to fight you with, and the time and tem- 
per wasted." 

Emerson met John Muir in the Yosemite in 
1871 and was evidently impressed with him. 
Somewhere he gives a list of his men which begins 
with Carlyle and ends with Muir. Here was an- 
other man with more character than intellect, as 
Emerson said of Carlyle, and with the flavor of 
the wild about him. Muir was not too compliant 
and deferential. He belonged to the sayers of 
No. Contradiction was the breath of his nostrils. 
He had the Scottish chariness of bestowing praise 
or approval, and could surely give Emerson the 
sense of being met which he demanded. Writing 
was irksome to Muir as it was to Carlyle, but in 
.monologue, in an attentive company, he shone; 
23 



THE LAST HARVEST 

not a great thinker, but a mind strongly character- 
istic. His philosophy rarely rose above that of 
the Sunday school, but his moral fiber was very 
strong, and his wit ready and keen. In conversa- 
tion and in daily intercourse he was a man not 
easily put aside. Emerson found him deeply read 
in nature lore and with some suggestion about his 
look and manner of the wild and rugged solitude 
in which he lived so much. 

Emerson was alive to everything around him; 
every object touched some spring in his mind; 
the church spire, the shadows on the windows at 
night, the little girl with her pail of whortleberries, 
the passing bee, bird, butterfly, the clouds, the 
streams, the trees — all found his mind open to 
any suggestion they might make. He is intent on 
the now and the here. He listens to every new- 
comer with an expectant air. He is full of the 
present. I once saw him at West Point during the 
June examinations. How alert and eager he was ! 
The bored and perfunctory air of his fellow mem- 
bers on the Board of Visitors contrasted sharply 
with his active, expectant interest. 



He lived absolutely in his own day and genera- 
tion, and no contemporary writer of real worth 
escaped his notice. He is never lavish in his 
praise, but is for the most part just and discrimi- 
24 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

nating. Walt Whitman is mentioned only thrice 
in the Journals, Lowell only twice, Longfellow 
once or twice, Matthew Arnold three times, but 
Jones Very is quoted and discussed sixteen times. 
Very was a poet who had no fast colors; he has 
quite faded out in our day. 

Of Matthew Arnold Emerson says: "I should 
like to call attention to the critical superiority of 
Arnold, his excellent ear for style, and the singular 
poverty of his poetry, that in fact he has written 
but one poem, 'Thyrsis,' and that on an inspira- 
tion borrowed from Milton." Few good readers, 
I think, will agree with Emerson about the poverty 
of Arnold's poetry. His "Dover Beach" is one 
of the first-rate poems in English literature. Em- 
erson has words of praise for Lowell — thinks the 
production of such a man "a certificate of good 
elements in the soil, climate, and institutions of 
America," but in 1868 he declares that his new 
poems show an advance " in talent rather than in 
poetic tone"; that the advance "rather expresses 
his wish, his ambition, than the uncontrollable inte- 
rior impulse which is the authentic mark of a new 
poem, and which is unanalysable, and makes the 
merit of an ode of Collins, or Gray, or Words- 
worth, or Herbert, or Byron." He evidently 
thought little of Lowell's severe arraignment of 
him in a college poem which he wrote soon after 
the delivery of the famous "Divinity School 
25 



THE LAST HARVEST 

Address." The current of religious feeling in Cam- 
bridge set so strongly against Emerson for several 
years that Lowell doubtless merely reflected it. 
Why did he not try to deflect it, or to check it? 
And yet, when Emerson's friends did try to de- 
fend him, it was against his will. He hated to be 
defended in a newspaper: "As long as all that is 
said is against me I feel a certain austere assurance 
of success, but as soon as honeyed words of praise 
are spoken for me I feel as one that lies unprotected 
before his enemies." 

Next to Thoreau, Emerson devotes to Alcott 
more space in his Journals than to any other man. 
It is all telling interpretation, description, and 
criticism. Truly, Alcott must have had some ex- 
traordinary power to have made such a lasting 
impression upon Emerson. When my friend 
Myron Benton and I first met Emerson in 1863 
at West Point, Emerson spoke of Alcott very point- 
edly, and said we should never miss a chance to 
hear his conversation, but that when he put pen 
to paper all his inspiration left him. His thoughts 
faded as soon as he tried to set them down. There 
must have been some curious illusion about it all 
on the part of Emerson, as no fragment of Alcott's 
wonderful talk worth preserving has come down to 
us. The waters of the sea are blue, but not in the 
pailful. There must have been something analo- 
gous in Alcott's conversations, some total effect 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

which the details do not justify, or something in 
the atmosphere which he created, that gave cer- 
tain of his hearers the conviction that they were 
voyaging with him through the celestial depths. 

It was a curious fact that Alcott ''could not re- 
call one word or part of his own conversation, or 
of any one's, let the expression be never so happy." 
And he seems to have hypnotized Emerson in the 
same way. "He made here some majestic utter- 
ances, but so inspired me that even I forgot the 
words often." "Olympian dreams," Emerson 
calls his talk — moonshine, it appears at this 
distance. 

"His discourse soars to a wonderful height," 
says Emerson, "so regular, so lucid, so playful, so 
new and disdainful of all boundaries of tradition 
and experience, that the hearers seem no longer to 
have bodies or material gravity, but almost they 
can mount into the air at pleasure, or leap at one 
bound out of this poor solar system. I say this 
of his speech exclusively, for when he attempts to 
write, he loses, in my judgment, all his power, and 
I derive more pain than pleasure from the perusal." 
Some illusion surely that made the effort to report 
him like an attempt to capture the rainbow, only 
to find it common water. 

In 1842 Emerson devotes eight pages in his 
Journal to an analysis of Alcott, and very masterly 
they are. He ends with these sentences: "This 
27 



THE LAST HARVEST 

noble genius discredits genius to me. I do not 
want any more such persons to exist." 

"When Alcott wrote from England that he was 
bringing home Wright and Lane, I wrote him a 
letter which I required him to show them, saying 
that they might safely trust his theories, but that 
they should put no trust whatever in his statement 
of facts. When they all arrived here — he and 
his victims — I asked them if he showed them the 
letter ; they answered that he did ; so I was clear." 

Another neighbor who greatly impressed Em- 
erson, and of whom he has much to say, was 
Father Taylor, the sailor preacher of Boston. There 
is nothing better in the Journals than the pages 
devoted to description and analysis of this remark- 
able man. To Emerson he suggested the 
wealth of Nature. He calls him a "godly poet, the 
Shakespear of the sailor and the poor." "I de- 
light in his great personality, the way and sweep 
of the man which, like a frigate's wa}% takes up 
for the time the centre of the ocean, paves it with 
a white street, and all the lesser craft 'do curtsey 
to him, do him reverence.' " A man all emotion, 
all love, all inspiration, but, like Alcott, impossible 
to justify your high estimate of by any quotation. 
His power was all personal living power, and could 
not be transferred to print. The livid embers of 
his discourse became dead charcoal when reported 
by another, or, as Emerson more happily puts it, 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

"A creature of instinct, his colors are all opaline 
and dove's-neck-lustre and can only be seen at 
a distance. Examine them, and they disappear." 
More exactly they are visible only at a certain 
angle. Of course this is in a measure true of all 
great oratory — it is not so much the words as 
the man. 

Speaking of Father Taylor in connection with 
Alcott, Emerson says that one was the fool of his 
ideas, and the other of his fancy. 

An intellectual child of Emerson's was Ellery 
Channing, but he seems to have inherited in an 
exaggerated form only the faults of his father. 
Channing appears to have been a crotchety, dis- 
gruntled person, always aiming at walking on his 
head instead of on his heels. Emerson quotes 
many of his sayings, not one of them worth pre- 
serving, all marked by a kind of violence and dis- 
jointedness. They had many walks together. 

Emerson was so fond of paradoxes and extreme 
statements that both Channing and Thoreau seem 
to have vied with each other in uttering hard or 
capricious sayings when in his presence. Emer- 
son catches at a vivid and picturesque statement, 
if it has even a fraction of truth in it, like a fly- 
catcher at a fly. 

A fair sample of Channing's philosophy is the fol- 
lowing : "He persists in his bad opinion of orchards 
and farming, declares that the only success he ever 



THE LAST HARVEST 

had with a farmer was that he once paid a cent for 
a russet apple; and farming, he thinks, is an 
attempt to outwit God with a hoe ; that they plant 
a great many potatoes with much ado, but it is 
doubtful if they ever get the seed back." Chan- 
ning seems to have dropped such pearls of wis- 
dom as that all along the road in their walks ! 
Another sample of Channing's philosophy which 
Emerson thinks worthy of quoting. They were 
walking over the fields in November. Channing 
complained of the poverty of invention on the part 
of Nature : " * Why, they had frozen water last 
year; why should they do it again? Therefore 
it was so easy to be an artist, because they do the 
same thing always,' and therefore he only wants 
time to make him perfect in the imitation." 

VI 
Emerson was occupied entirely with the future, as 
Carlyle was occupied entirely with the past. Emer- 
son shared the open expectation of the new world, 
Carlyle struggled under the gloom and pessimism of 
the old — a greater character, but a far less lambent 
and helpful spirit. Emerson seems to have been 
obsessed with the idea that a new and greater man 
was to appear. He looked into the face of every 
newcomer with an earnest, expectant air, as if he 
might prove to be the new man : this thought in- 
spires the last stanzas of his " Song of Nature" : 

30 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

"Let war and trade and creeds and song 
Blend, ripen race on race, 
The sunburnt world a man shall breed 
Of all the zones and countless days. 

"No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, 
My oldest force is good as new, 
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn 
Gives back the bending heavens in dew." 

Emerson was under no illusion as to the effect 
of distance. He knew the past was once the pres- 
ent, and that if it seemed to be transformed and to 
rise into cloud-land behind us, it was only the en- 
chantment of distance — an enchantment which 
men have been under in all ages. The everyday, 
the near-at-hand, become prosaic ; there is no room 
for the alchemy of time and space to work in. It 
has been said that all martyrdoms looked mean in 
the suffering. Holy ground is not holy when we 
walk upon it. The now and the here seem cheap 
and commonplace. Emerson knew that "a score 
of airy miles will smooth rough Monadnoc to a 
gem," but he knew also that it would not change 
the character of Monadnoc. He knew that the 
past and the present, the near and the far, were 
made of one stuff. He united the courage of sci- 
ence with the sensibility of poetry. He would not 
be defrauded of the value of the present hour, or 
of the thoughts which he and other men think, or 
of the lives which they live to-day. " I will tell 
you how you can enrich me — if you will recom- 
mend to-day to me." His doctrine of self-reliance, 
31 



THE LAST HARVEST 

which he preached in season and out of season, was 
based upon the conviction that Nature and the soul 
do not become old and outworn, that the great 
characters and great thoughts of the past were the 
achievements of men who trusted themselves before 
custom or law. The sun shines to-day ; the con- 
stellations hang there in the heavens the same as of 
old. God is as near us as ever He was — why 
should we take our revelations at second hand? 
No other writer who has used the English language 
has ever preached such a heroic doctrine of self- 
trust, or set the present moment so high in the 
circle of the years, in the diadem of the days. 

It is an old charge against Emerson that he 
was deficient in human sympathy. He makes 
it against himself; the ties of association which 
most persons find so binding seemed to hold him 
very lightly. There was always a previous ques- 
tion with him — the moral value of one's associa- 
tions. Unless you sicken and die to some purpose, 
why such an ado about it ? Unless the old ruin of 
a house harbored great men and great women, or 
was the scene of heroic deeds, why linger around 
it? The purely human did not appeal to him; 
history interested him only as it threw light upon 
to-day. History is a record of the universal mind ; 
hence of your mind, of my mind — " all the facts 
of history preexist in the mind as laws." " What 
Plato thought, every man may think. What a 
32 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

saint has felt, he may feel ; what at any time has 
befallen any man, he can understand." "All 
that Shakespear says of the king, yonder slip of 
a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of 
himself " ; and so on, seeing in history only biog- 
raphy, and interested in the past only as he can 
link it with the present. Always an intellectual in- 
terest, never a human or an emotional one. His 
Journal does not reveal him going back to the old 
places, or lingering fondly over the memories of 
his youth. He speaks of his "unpleasing boy- 
hood," of his unhappy recollections, etc., not be- 
cause of unkindness or hardships experienced, 
but because of certain shortcomings or deficiencies 
of character and purpose, of which he is conscious 
— "some meanness," or "unfounded pride" which 
may lower him in the opinion of others. Pride, 
surely, but not ignoble pride. 

Emerson's expectation of the great poet, the 
great man, is voiced in his "Representative Men" : 
" If the companions of our childhood should turn out 
to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not 
surprise us." On the contrary, I think it would 
surprise most of us very much. It is from the 
remote, the unfamiliar, that we expect great things. 
We have no illusions about the near-at-hand. 
But with Emerson the contrary seems to have been 
the case. He met the new person or took up the 
new volume with a thrill of expectancy, a condition 



THE LAST HARVEST 

of mind which often led him to exaggerate the fact, 
and to give an undue bias in favor of the novel, 
the audacious, the revolutionary. His optimism 
carried him to great lengths. Many of the new 
stars in his literary firmament have quite faded 
out — all of them, I think, but Walt Whitman. 
It was mainly because he was so full of faith in the 
coming man that he gave, offhand, such a tremen- 
dous welcome to "Leaves of Grass" — a welcome 
that cooled somewhat later, when he found he had 
got so much more of the unconventional and the 
self-reliant than he had bargained for. I remem- 
ber that when I spoke of Walt Whitman to him in 
Washington in 1871 or '72, he said he wished Whit- 
man's friends would "quarrel" with him more 
about his poems, as some years earlier he himself 
had done, on the occasion when he and Whitman 
walked for hours on Boston Common, he remon- 
strating with Whitman about certain passages in 
"Leaves of Grass" which he tried in vain to per- 
suade him to omit in the next edition. Whitman 
would persist in being Whitman. Now, counseling 
such a course to a man in an essay on "Self -Reli- 
ance" is quite a different thing from entirely ap- 
proving of it in a concrete example. 

In 1840 Emerson writes: "A notice of modern 

literature ought to include (ought it not ?) a notice 

of Carlyle, of Tennyson, of Landor, of Bettina, of 

Sampson Reed." The first three names surely, but 

34 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

who is Bettina, the girl correspondent of Goethe, 
that she should go in such a list? Reed, we 
learn, was a Boston bank clerk, and a Swedenbor- 
gian, who wrote a book on the growth of the mind, 
from which Emerson quotes, and to which he often 
alludes, a book that has long been forgotten ; and 
is not Bettina forgotten also ? 

Emerson found more in Jones Very than has any 
one else; the poems of Very that he included in 
"Parnassus" have little worth. A comparatively 
unknown and now forgotten English writer also 
moved Emerson unduly. Listen to this : " In Eng- 
land, Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle, three men of 
original literary genius ; but the scholar, the catholic, 
cosmic intellect, Bacon's own son, the Lord Chief 
Justice on the Muse's Bench is " — who do you 
think, in 1847 ? — "Wilkinson" ! Garth Wilkinson, 
who wrote a book on the human body. Emerson 
says of him in "English Traits" : "There is in the 
action of his mind a long Atlantic roll, not known ex- 
cept in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought 
to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality." 
To bid a man's stock up like that may not, in the 
long run, be good for the man, but it shows what a 
generous, optimistic critic Emerson was. 

VII 

In his published works Emerson is chary of the 

personal element ; he says : " We can hardly speak 

35 



THE LAST HARVEST 

of our own experiences and the names of our friends 
sparingly enough." In his books he would be 
only an impersonal voice; the man Emerson, as 
such, he hesitated to intrude. But in the Journals 
we get much more of the personal element, as 
would be expected. We get welcome glimpses of 
the man, of his moods, of his diversions, of his 
home occupations, of his self-criticism. We see 
him as a host, as a lecturer, as a gardener, as a mem- 
ber of a rural community. We see him in his 
walks and talks with friends and neighbors — with 
Alcott, Thoreau, Channing, Jones Very, Hawthorne, 
and others — and get snatches of the conversations. 
We see the growth of his mind, his gradual emancipa- 
tion from the bondage of the orthodox traditions. 

Very welcome is the growth of Emerson's ap- 
preciation of Wordsworth. As a divinity student 
he was severe in his criticism of Wordsworth, but 
as his own genius unfolded more and more he saw 
the greatness of Wordsworth, till in middle life he 
pronounced his famous Ode the high-water mark 
of English literature. Yet after that his fondness 
for a telling, picturesque figure allows him to in- 
quire if Wordsworth is not like a bell with a wooden 
tongue. All this is an admirable illustration of 
his familiar dictum : "Speak what you think now 
in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-mor- 
row thinks in hard words again, though it contra- 
dict everything you say to-day." 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

In the Journals we see Emerson going up and 
down the country in his walks, on his lecture tours 
in the West, among his neighbors, wherever and 
whenever he goes as alert and watchful as a sports- 
man. He was a sportsman of a new kind ; his 
game was ideas. He was always looking for hints 
and images to aid him in his writings. He was 
like a bird perpetually building a nest ; every 
moment he wanted new material, and everything 
that diverted him from his quest was an unwelcome 
interruption. He had no great argument to build, 
no system of philosophy to organize and formulate, 
no plot, like a novelist, to work out, no controversy 
on hand — he wanted pertinent, concrete, and 
striking facts and incidents to weave in his essay 
on Fate, or Circles, or Character, or Farming, or 
Worship, or Wealth — something that his intui- 
tive and disjointed habit of thought could seize 
upon and make instant use of. 

We see him walking in free converse with his 
friends and neighbors, receiving them in his own 
house, friendly and expectant, but always standing 
aloof, never giving himself heartily to them, ex- 
changing ideas with them across a gulf, prizing 
their wit and their wisdom, but cold and reserved 
toward them personally, destitute of all feeling of 
comradeship, an eye, an ear, a voice, an intellect, 
but rarely, or in a minor degree, a heart, or a feeling 
of fellowship — a giving and a taking quite above 
37 



THE LAST HARVEST 

and beyond the reach of articulate speech. When 
they had had their say, he was done with them. 
When you have found a man's limitations, he says, 
it is all up with him. After your friend has fired 
his shot, good-by. The pearl in the oyster is 
what is wanted, and not the oyster. "If I love 
you, what is that to you?" is a saying that could 
have been coined only in Concord. It seems to 
me that the basis of all wholesome human attach- 
ment is character, not intellect. Admiration and 
love are quite different things. Transcendental 
friendships seem to be cold, bloodless affairs. 

One feels as if he wanted to squeeze or shake 
Emerson to see if he cannot get some normal hu- 
man love out of him, a love that looks for nothing 
beyond love, a love which is its own excuse for 
being, a love that is not a bargain — simple, com- 
mon, disinterested human love. But Emerson said, 
"I like man but not men." 

"You would have me love you," he writes in 
his Journal. "What shall I love? Your body? 
The supposition disgusts you. What you have 
thought and said ? Well, whilst you were thinking 
and saying them, but not now. I see no possibility 
of loving anything but what now is, and is becom- 
ing; your courage, your enterprise, your budding 
affection, your opening thought, your prayer, I 
can love — but what else ? " 

Can you not love your friend for himself alone, 
38 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

for his kinship with you, without taking an inven- 
tory of his moral and intellectual qualities; for 
something in him that makes you happy in his 
presence? The personal attraction which Whit- 
man felt between himself and certain types of men, 
and which is the basis of most manly friendships, 
Emerson probably never felt. One cannot con- 
ceive of him as caring deeply for any person who 
could not teach him something. He says, "I 
speculate on virtue, not burn with love." Again, 
"A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable pros- 
perity that can come to me." Pure intellectual 
values seem alone to have counted with Emerson 
and his followers. With men his question was, 
" What can you teach me?" With Nature, " What 
new image or suggestion have you got for me to- 
day ? " With science, "What ethical value do your 
facts hold ? " With natural history, " Can I translate 
your facts and laws into my supernatural history ? " 
With civil history, "Will your record help me to 
understand my own day and land?" The quin- 
tessence of things was what he always sought. 

"We cannot forgive another for not being our- 
selves," Emerson wrote in 1842, and then added, 
"We lose time in trying to be like others." One 
is reminded of passages in the Emerson-Carlyle 
correspondence, wherein each tried to persuade 
the other to be like himself. Carlyle would have 
Emerson "become concrete and write in prose the 



THE LAST HARVEST 

straightest way," would have him come down from 
his "perilous altitude," "soliloquizing on the eter- 
nal mountain-tops only, in vast solitude, where 
men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim 
remoteness and only the man and the stars and the 
earth are visible — come down into your own poor 
Nineteenth Century, its follies, its maladies, its 
blind, or half -blind but gigantic toilings, its laughter 
and its tears, and try to evolve in some meas- 
ure the hidden God-like that lies in it." "I wish 
you would take an American hero, one whom you 
really love, and give us a History of him — make 
an artistic bronze statue (in good words) of his 
Life and him!" Emerson's reply in effect is, 
Cremate your heroes and give me their ashes — 
give me "the culled results, the quintessence of 
private conviction, a liber veritatis, a few sentences, 
hints of the final moral you draw from so much pen- 
etrating inquest into past and present men." 

In reply to Carlyle's criticism of the remote and 
abstract character of his work, Emerson says, 
"What you say now and heretofore respecting the 
remoteness of my writing and thinking from real 
life, though I hear substantially the same criticism 
made by my countrymen, I do not know what it 
means. If I can at any time express the law and 
the ideal right, that should satisfy me without 
measuring the divergence from it of the last act of 
Congress." 

40 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

vni 

Emerson's love of nature was one of his ruling 
passions. It took him to the country to live, it 
led him to purchase Walden Pond and the Walden 
woods; it led him forth upon his almost daily 
walks, winter and summer, to the fields and the 
woods. His was the love of the poet and the ideal- 
ist, of the man who communes with Nature, and 
finds a moral and an intellectual tonic in her works. 
The major part of his poetry is inspired by Nature. 
He complains of Tennyson's poetry that it has 
few or no wood notes. His first book, "Nature," 
is steeped in religious and poetic emotion. He 
said in his Journal in 1841 : "All my thoughts are 
foresters. I have scarce a day-dream on which the 
breath of the pines has not blown, and their shad- 
ows waved. Shall I not then call my little book 
Forest Essays?" He finally called it "Nature." 
He loves the "hermit birds that harbor in the 
woods. I can do well for weeks with no other 
society than the partridge and the jay, my daily 
company." 

"I have known myself entertained by a single 
dew-drop, or an icicle, by a liatris, or a fungus, 
and seen God revealed in the shadow of a leaf." 
He says that going to Nature is more than a medi- 
cine, it is health. "As I walked in the woods I 
felt what I often feel, that nothing can befall me 
in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me my 
41 



THE LAST HARVEST 

eyes) to which Nature will not offer a sweet con- 
solation. Standing on the bare ground with my 
head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into 
the infinite space, I became happy in my universal 
relations." This sentiment of his also recalls his 
lines : 

"A woodland walk, 
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush, 
A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine, 
Salve my worst wounds." 

If life were long enough, among my thousand and 
one works should be a book of Nature whereof Howitt's 
Seasons should not be so much the model as the parody. 
It should contain the natural history of the woods 
around my shifting camp for every month in the year. 
It should tie their astronomy, botany, physiology, me- 
teorology, picturesque, and poetry together. No bird, 
no bug, no bud, should be forgotten on his day and 
hour. To-day the chickadees, the robins, bluebirds and 
song-sparrows sang to me. I dissected the buds of 
the birch and the oak ; in every one of the last is a star. 
The crow sat above as idle as I below. The river 
flowed brimful, and I philosophised upon this compos- 
ite, collective beauty which refuses to be analysed. 
Nothing is beautiful alone. Nothing but is beautiful 
in the whole. Learn the history of a craneberry. Mark 
the day when the pine cones and acorns fall. 

I go out daily and nightly to feed my eyes on the 
horizon and the sky, and come to feel the want of this 
scope as I do of water for my washing. 

What learned I this morning in the woods, the orac- 
ular woods? Wise are they, the ancient nymphs; 
pleasing, sober, melancholy truth say those untameable 
savages, the pines. 

42 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

He frequently went to Walden Pond of an after- 
noon and read Goethe or some other great author. 

There was an element of mysticism in Emerson's 
love of nature as there is in that of all true nature- 
lovers. None knew better than he that nature is 
not all birds and flowers. His love of nature was 
that of the poet and artist, and not that of the 
scientist or naturalist. 

"I tell you I love the peeping of the Hyla in a 
pond in April, or the evening cry of the whippoor- 
will, better than all the bellowing of all the Bulls 
of Bashan, or all the turtles of all Palestine." 

Any personal details about his life which Emer- 
son gives us are always welcome. We learn that 
his different winter courses of lectures in Boston, 
usually ten of them, were attended on an average 
by about five hundred persons, and netted him 
about five hundred dollars. 

When he published a new volume, he was very 
liberal with presentation copies. Of his first vol- 
ume of poems, published in 1846, he sent eighty 
copies to his friends. When " May-Day " was pub- 
lished in 1867, he sent fifty copies to friends ; one 
of them went to Walt Whitman. I saw it the day it 
came. It was in a white dress (silk, I think) ; very 
beautiful. He sent a copy of his first volume of 
" Nature " to Landor. One would like to know what 
Landor said in reply. The copy he sent to Carlyle I 
saw in the Scot's library, in Cheyne Row, in 1871. 
43 



THE LAST HARVEST 

IX 

Emerson was so drawn to the racy and original 
that it seems as if original sin had a certain fas- 
cination for him. The austere, the Puritanical 
Emerson, the heir of eight generations of clergy- 
men, the man who did not like to have Frederika 
Bremer play the piano in his house on Sunday, 
seems at times to covet the "swear- words" of the 
common people. They itch at his ears, they have 
flavor and reality. He sometimes records them in 
his Journal ; for example, this remark of the Cana- 
dian wood-chopper who cut wood for his neighbor 
— he preferred to work by the job rather than by 
the day — the days were "so damned long !" 

The mob, Emerson says, is always interesting : 
"A blacksmith, a truckman, a farmer, we follow 
into the bar-room and watch with eagerness what 
they shall say." "Cannot the stinging dialect of 
the sailor be domesticated?" "My page about 
Consistency would be better written, 'Damn Con- 
sistency. ' " But try to fancy Emerson swearing 
like the men on the street ! Once only he swore a 
sacred oath, and that he himself records : it was 
called out by the famous, and infamous, Fugitive 
Slave Law which made every Northern man hound 
and huntsman for the Southern slave-driver. 
"This filthy enactment," he says, "was made in 
the Nineteenth Century by men who could read 
and write. I will not obey it, by God ! " 
44 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

Evidently the best thing the laboring people had 
to offer Emerson was their racy and characteristic 
speech. When one of his former neighbors said of 
an eclipse of the sun that it looked as if a "nigger" 
was poking his head into the sun, Emerson recorded 
it in his Journal. His son reports that Emerson 
enjoyed the talk of the stable-men and used to 
tell their anecdotes and boasts of their horses when 
he came home; for example, "In the stable you'd 
take him for a slouch, but lead him to the door, and 
when he lifts up his eyes, and looks abroad, — by 
thunder! you'd think the sky was all horse." 
Such surprises and exaggerations always attracted 
him, unless they took a turn that made him laugh. 
He loved wit with the laugh taken out of it. The 
genial smile and not uproarious laughter suited 
his mood best. 

He was a lover of quiet, twinkling humor. Such 
humor gleams out often in his Journal. It gleams 
in this passage about Dr. Ripley: "Dr. Ripley 
prays for rain with great explicitness on Sunday, 
and on Monday the showers fell. When I spoke 
of the speed with which his prayers were answered, 
the good man looked modest." There is another 
prayer-for-rain story that he enjoys telling: "Dr. 
Allyne, of Duxbury, prayed for rain, at church. In 
the afternoon the boys carried umbrellas. * Why ? ' 
* Because you prayed for rain.' 'Pooh! boys! we 
always pray for rain : it 's customary.' " 
45 



THE LAST HARVEST 

At West Point he asked a lieutenant if they had 
morning prayers at college. "We have reveilU 
beat, which is the same thing." 

He tells with relish the story of a German who 
went to hire a horse and chaise at a stable in Cam- 
bridge. "Shall I put in a buffalo?" inquired the 
livery-man. "My God ! no," cried the astonished 
German, "put in a horse." 

Emerson, I am sure, takes pleasure in relating 
a characteristic story of Dr. Ripley and a thunder- 
shower: "One August afternoon, when I was in 
the hayfield helping him with his man to rake up 
his hay, I well remember his pleading, almost re- 
proachful looks at the sky when the thunder gust 
was coming up to spoil the hay. He raked very fast, 
then looked at the clouds and said, 'We are in the 
Lord's hands, mind your rake, George ! we are in 
the Lord's hands,' and seemed to say, 'You know 
me, the field is mine — Dr. Ripley's — thine own 
servant.'" 

The stories Emerson delighted in were all rich 
in this quiet humor. I heard of one he used to tell 
about a man who, when he went to his club at 
night, often fingered too long over his cups, and 
came home befuddled in the small hours, and was 
frequently hauled over the coals by his wife. One 
night he again came home late, and was greeted 
with the usual upbraiding in the morning. "It 
was not late," he said, " it was only one o'clock," 
46 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

" It was much later than that," said the wife. "It 
was one o'clock," repeated the man; "I heard it 
strike one three or four times !" 

Another good Emersonian story, though I do 
not know that he ever heard it, is that of an old 
woman who had a farm in Indiana near the Michi- 
gan line. The line was resurveyed, and the au- 
thorities set her farm in Michigan. The old lady 
protested — she said it was all she could do to 
stand the winters of Indiana, she could never stand 
those of Michigan ! 

Cannot one see a twinkle in Emerson's eye when 
he quotes his wife as saying that "it is wicked to 
go to church on Sunday " ? Emerson's son records 
that his father hated to be made to laugh, as he 
could not command his face well. Hence he evi- 
dently notes with approval another remark of his 
wife's : "A human being should beware how he 
laughs, for then he shows all his faults." What 
he thought of the loud, surprising laugh with 
which Carlyle often ended his bitter sentences, I 
do not know that he records. Its meaning to Car- 
lyle was evidently, " Oh ! what does it all matter ? " 
If Emerson himself did not smile when he wrote 
the sentence about " a maiden so pure that she 
exchanged glances only with the stars," his reader, 
I am sure, will. 

Emerson evidently enjoyed such a story as this 
which was told him by a bishop : There was a dis- 
47 



THE LAST HARVEST 

pute in a vestry at Providence between two hot 
church-members. One said at last, " I should 
like to know who you are " — 

" Who I am? " cried the other, — " who I am ! 
I am a humble Christian, you damned old heathen, 
you!" 

The minister whom he heard say that "nobody 
enjoyed religion less than ministers, as none en- 
joyed food so little as cooks," must have provoked 
the broadest kind of a smile. 

Although one of Emerson's central themes in 
his Journals was his thought about God, or his 
feeling for the Infinite, he never succeeded in for- 
mulating his ideas on the subject and could not 
say what God is or is not. At the age of twenty- 
one he wrote in his Journal, " I know that I know 
next to nothing." A very unusual, but a very 
promising frame of mind for a young man. " It is 
not certain that God exists, but that He does not 
is a most bewildering and improbable Chimera." 

A little later he wrote : " The government of 
God is not a plan — that would be Destiny, [or 
we may say Calvinism,] it is extempore." 

He quotes this from Plotinus : "Of the Unity of 
God, nothing can be predicated, neither being, nor 
essence, nor life, for it is above all these." 

It was a bold saying of his that " God builds 
his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and 
religion." 

48 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

" A great deal of God in the universe," he says, 
" but not available to us until we can make it up 
into a man." 

But if asked, What makes it up into a man? 
why does it take this form? he would have been 
hard put to it for an answer. 

Persons who assume to know all about God, as 
if He lived just around the corner, as Matthew 
Arnold said, will not find much comfort in Emer- 
son's uncertainty and blind groping for adequate 
expression concerning Him. How can we put the 
All, the Eternal, in words ? How can we define the 
Infinite without self-contradiction? Our minds 
are cast in the mould of the finite; our language 
is fashioned from our dealings with a world of 
boundaries and limitations and concrete objects 
and forces. How much can it serve us in deal- 
ing with a world of opposite kind — with the 
Whole, the Immeasurable, the Omnipresent, and 
Omnipotent? Of what use are our sounding-lines 
in a bottomless sea? How are we to apply our 
conceptions of personality to the all-life, to that 
which transcends all limitations, to that which is 
everywhere and yet nowhere? Shall we assign a 
local habitation and a name to the universal en- 
ergy? As the sunlight puts out our lamp or can- 
dle, so our mental lights grow pale in the presence 
of the Infinite Light. We can deal with the solid 
bodies on the surface of the earth, but the earth as 
49 



THE LAST HARVEST 

a sphere in the heavens baffles us. All our terms 
of over and under, up and down, east and west, 
and the like, fail us. You may go westward around 
the world and return to your own door coming 
from the east. The circle is a perpetual contradic- 
tion, the sphere a surface without boundaries, 
a mass without weight. When we ascribe weight 
to the earth, we are trying it by the standards of 
bodies on its surface — the pull of the earth is the 
measure of their weight; but the earth itself — 
what pulls that ? Only some larger body can pull 
that, and the adjustment of the system is such 
that the centripetal and centrifugal forces balance 
each other, and the globes float as lightly as any 
feather. 

Emerson said he denied personality to God be- 
cause it is too little, not too much. If you ascribe 
personality to God, it is perfectly fair to pester 
you with questions about Him. Where is He? 
How long has He been there ? What does He do ? 
Personality without place, or form, or substance, 
or limitation is a contradiction of terms. We are 
the victims of words. We get a name for a thing 
and then invent the thing that fits it. All our 
names for the human faculties, as the will, the 
reason, the understanding, the imagination, con- 
science, instincts, and so on, are arbitrary divisions 
of a whole, to suit our own convenience, like the 
days of the week, or the seasons of the year. Out 
50 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

of unity we make diversity for purposes of our 
practical needs. Thought tends to the one, action 
to the many. We must have small change for 
everything in the universe, because our lives are 
made up of small things. We must break wholes 
up into fractions, and then seek their common 
multiple. Only thus can we deal with them. We 
deal with God by limiting Him and breaking 
Him up into his attributes, or by conceiving Him 
under the figure of the Trinity. He is thus less 
baffling to us. We can handle Him the better. 
We make a huge man of Him and then try to 
dodge the consequences of our own limitations. 

All these baffling questions pressed hard upon 
Emerson. He could not do without God in na- 
ture, and yet, like most of us, he could not justify 
himself until he had trimmed and cut away a part 
of nature. God is the All, but the All is a hard 
mass to digest. It means hell as well as heaven, 
demon as well as seraph, geology as well as biology, 
devolution as well as evolution, earthquake as well 
as earth tranquillity, cyclones as well as summer 
breezes, the jungle as well as the household, pain 
as well as pleasure, death as well as life. How 
are you to reconcile all these contradictions ? 

Emerson said that nature was a swamp with 

flowers and birds on the borders, and terrible things 

in the interior. Shall we have one God for the 

fair things, and another God for the terrible things ? 

51 



THE LAST HARVEST 

" Nature is saturated with deity," he says, the 
terrific things as the beatific, I suppose. "A great 
deal of God in the universe," he again says, " but 
not valuable to us till we can make it up into a 
man." And when we make it up into a man we 
have got a true compendium of nature; all the 
terrific and unholy elements — fangs and poisons 
and eruptions, sharks and serpents — have each 
and all contributed something to the make-up. 
Man is nature incarnated, no better, no worse. 

But the majority of mankind who take any in- 
terest in the God-question at all will probably 
always think of the Eternal in terms of man, and 
endow Him with personality. 

One feels like combating some of Emerson's 
conclusions, or, at least, like discounting them. 
His refusal to see any value in natural science as 
such, I think, shows his limitations. " Natural 
history," he says, " by itself has no value ; it is 
like a single sex; but marry it to human history 
and it is poetry. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus', and 
Buffon's volumes contain not one line of poetry." 
Of course he speaks for himself. Natural facts, 
scientific truth, as such, had no interest to him. 
One almost feels as if this were idealism gone to 
seed. 

" Shall I say that the use of Natural Science 
seems merely * ancillary ' to Morals ? I would 
learn the law of the defraction of a ray because 
52 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

when I understand it, it will illustrate, perhaps 
suggest, a new truth in ethics." Is the ethical 
and poetic value of the natural sciences, then, 
their main or only value to the lay mind? 
Their technical details, their tables and formulae 
and measurements, we may pass by, but the 
natural truths they disclose are of interest to 
the healthy mind for their own sake. It is not the 
ethics of chemical reactions and combinations — 
if there be ethics in them — that arrests our atten- 
tion, but the light they throw on the problem of 
how the world was made, and how our own lives go 
on. The method of Nature in the physical world 
no doubt affords clues to the method of Nature in 
the non-physical, or supersensuous world. But 
apart from that, it is incredible that a mind like 
Emerson's took no interest in natural knowledge 
for its own sake. The fact that two visible and 
inodorous gases like hydrogen and oxygen — one 
combustible and the other the supporter of com- 
bustion — when chemically combined produce 
water, which extinguishes fire, is intensely interest- 
ing as affording us a glimpse of the contradictions 
and paradoxes that abound everywhere in Nature's 
methods. If there is any ethics or any poetry in 
it, let him have it who can extract it. The great 
facts of nature, such as the sphericity of the cos- 
mic bodies, their circular motions, their mutual 
interdependence, the unprovable ether in which 
53 



THE LAST HARVEST 

they float, the blue dome of the sky, the master 
currents of the ocean, the primary and the second- 
ary rocks, have an intellectual value, but how 
they in any way illustrate the moral law is hard to 
see. The ethics, or right and wrong, of attraction 
and repulsion, of positive and negative, have no 
validity outside the human sphere. Might is right 
in Nature, or, rather, we are outside the standards 
of right and wrong in her sphere. Scientific knowl- 
edge certainly has a poetic side to it, but we do 
not go to chemistry or to geology or to botany for 
rules for the conduct of life. We go to these things 
mainly for the satisfaction which the knowledge 
of Nature's ways gives us. 

So with natural history. For my own part I 
find the life-histories of the wild creatures about 
me, their ways of getting on in the world, their 
joys, their fears, their successes, their failures, their 
instincts, their intelligence, intensely interesting 
without any ulterior considerations. I am not 
looking for ethical or poetic values. I am looking 
for natural truths. I am less interested in the 
sermons in stones than I am in the life under the 
stones. The significance of the metamorphosis 
of the grub into the butterfly does not escape me, 
but I am more occupied with the way the cater- 
pillar weaves her cocoon and hangs herself up for 
the winter than I am in this lesson. I had rather 
see a worm cast its skin than see a king crowned. 
54 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

I had rather see Phoebe building her mud nest 
than the preacher writing his sermon. I had rather 
see the big moth emerge from her cocoon — fresh 
and untouched as a coin that moment from the 
die — than the most fashionable " coming out " 
that society ever knew. The first song sparrow 
or bluebird or robin in spring, or the first hepatica 
or arbutus or violet, or the first clover or pond- 
lily in summer — must we demand some mystic 
password of them? Must we not love them for 
their own sake, ere they will seem worthy of our 
love ? 

To convert natural facts into metaphysical 
values, or into moral or poetic values — in short, to 
make literature out of science — is a high achieve- 
ment, and is worthy of Emerson at his best, but 
to claim that this is their sole or main use is to push 
idealism to the extreme. The poet, the artist, 
the nature writer not only mixes his colors with 
his brains, he mixes them with his heart's blood. 
Hence his pictures attract us without doing vio- 
lence to nature. 

We will not deny Emerson his right to make 
poetry out of nature ; we bless him for the inspira- 
tion he has drawn from this source, for his " Wood- 
notes," his " Humble-Bee," his " Titmouse," his 
"May-Day," his "Sea-Shore," his "Snow- 
storm," and many other poems. But we must 
" quarrel " with him a little, to use one of his fa- 
55 



THE LAST HARVEST 

vorite words, for seeming to undervalue the facts 
of natural science, as such, and to belittle the works 
of the natural historian because he does not give 
us poetry and lessons in morals instead of botany and 
geology and ornithology, pure and simple. " Every- 
thing," he says, " should be treated poetically — 
law, politics, housekeeping, money. A judge and 
a banker must drive their craft poetically, as well 
as a dancer or a scribe. That is, they must exert 
that higher vision which causes the object to be- 
come fluid and plastic." " If you would write a 
code, or logarithms, or a cook-book, you cannot 
spare the poetic impulse." " No one will doubt 
that battles can be fought poetically who reads 
Plutarch or Las Casas." 

We are interested in the wild life around us be- 
cause the lives of the wild creatures in a measure 
parallel our own; because they are the partakers 
of the same bounty of nature that we are; they 
are fruit of the same biological tree. We are in- 
terested in knowing how they get on in the world. 
Bird and bee, fish and man, are all made of one 
stuff, are all akin. The evolutionary impulse that 
brought man, brought his dog and horse. Did 
Emerson, indeed, only go to nature as he went to 
the bank, to make a draft upon it ? Was his walk 
barren that brought him no image, no new idea? 
Was the day wasted that did not add a new line to 
his verse ? He appears to have gone up and down 
56 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

the land seeking images. He was so firmly per- 
suaded that there is not a passage in the human 
soul, perhaps not a shade of thought, but has its 
emblem in nature, that he was ever on the alert 
to discover these relations of his own mind to the 
external world. " I see the law of Nature equally 
exemplified in bar-room and in a saloon of the phi- 
losopher. I get instruction and the opportunities 
of my genius indifferently in all places, companies, 
and pursuits, so only there be antagonisms." 

Emerson thought that science as such bereaved 
Nature of her charm. To the man of little or no 
imagination or sensibility to beauty, Nature has 
no charm anyhow, but if he have these gifts, they 
will certainly survive scientific knowledge, and be 
quickened and heightened by it. 

After we have learned all that the astronomers 
can tell us about the midnight heavens, do we look 
up at the stars with less wonder and awe? After 
we have learned all that the chemist and the physi- 
cist can tell us about matter — its interior activities 
and its exterior laws and relations — do we ad- 
mire and marvel less? After the geologist has 
told us all he has found out about the earth's crust 
and the rocks, when we quarry our building- 
stone, do we plough and hoe and plant its soil 
with less interest and veneration ? No, science as 
the pursuit of truth causes light to spring out of 
the abysmal darkness, and enhances our love and 
57 



THE LAST HARVEST 

interest in Nature. Is the return of the seasons 
less welcome because we know the cause? Is an 
eclipse less startling because it occurs exactly on 
time? Science bereaves Nature of her dread and 
fearsomeness, it breaks the spell which the igno- 
rance and credulity of men have cast upon her. 

Emerson had little use for science except so far 
as it yielded him symbols and parables for his 
superscience. The electric spark did not kindle 
his interest unless it held an ethical fact for him; 
chemical reactions were dull affairs unless he 
could trace their laws in mental reactions. " Read 
chemistry a little," he said, " and you will quickly 
see that its laws and experiments will furnish an 
alphabet or vocabulary for all of your moral 
observations." He found a lesson in composi- 
tion in the fact that the diamond and lamp- 
black are the same substance differently arranged. 
Good writing, he said, is a chemical combination, 
and not a mechanical mixture. That is not the 
noblest chemistry that can extract sunshine from 
cucumbers, but that which can extract "honor 
from scamps, temperance from sots, energy from 
beggars, justice from thieves, benevolence from 
misers." 

Though mindful of the birds and flowers and 
trees and rivers in his walks, it was mainly through 
his pressing need of figures and symbols for tran- 
scendental use. He says, " Whenever you enumer- 
58 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

ate a physical law, I hear in it a moral law." His 
final interest was in the moral law. Unless the 
scientific fact you brought him had some moral 
value, it made little impression upon him. 

He admits he is more interested to know " why 
the star form is so oft repeated in botany, and why 
the number five is such a favorite with Nature, 
than to understand the circulation of the sap and 
the formation of buds." His insight into Nature, 
and the prophetic character of his genius, are seen 
in many ways, among others in his anticipation or 
poetic forecast of the Darwinian theory of the origin 
of species, in 1853. 

"We want a higher logic to put us in training 
for the laws of creation. How does the step for- 
ward from one species to a higher species of an 
existing genus take place? The ass is not the 
parent of the horse; no fish begets a bird. But 
the concurrence of new conditions necessitates a 
new object in which these conditions meet and 
flower. When the hour is struck in onward nature, 
announcing that all is ready for the birth of 
higher form and nobler function, not one pair of 
parents, but the whole consenting system thrills, 
yearns, and produces. It is a favorable aspect of 
planets and of elements." 

In 1840 he wrote, "The method of advance 
in Nature is perpetual transformation." In the 
same year he wrote : 

$9 



THE LAST HARVEST 

" There is no leap — not a shock of violence 
throughout nature. Man therefore must be pre- 
dicted in the first chemical relation exhibited by 
the first atom. If we had eyes to see it, this bit 
of quartz would certify us of the necessity that 
man must exist as inevitably as the cities he has 
actually built." 

X 
How fruitful in striking and original men New 
England was in those days — poets, orators, pictur- 
esque characters ! In Concord, Emerson, Thoreau, 
Hawthorne, Alcott; in Boston and Cambridge, 
Lowell, Longfellow, Norton, Holmes, Higginson, 
Father Taylor, Bancroft, Everett, and others, with 
Webster standing out like a Colossus on the New 
Hampshire granite. This crop of geniuses seems 
to have been the aftermath of the Revolution. 
Will our social and industrial revolution bring any- 
thing like another such a crop? Will the great 
World War produce another ? Until now too much 
prosperity, too much mammon, too much " at 
ease in Zion " has certainly prevailed for another 
band of great idealists to appear. 

Emerson could never keep his eyes off Webster. 
He was fairly hypnotized by the majesty and 
power of his mind and personality, and he recurs 
to him in page after page of his Journal. Web- 
ster was of primary stuff like the granite of his 
native hills, while such a man as Everett was of 
60 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

the secondary formation, like the sandstone rocks. 
Emerson was delighted when he learned that Car- 
lyle, " with those devouring eyes, with that por- 
traying hand," had seen Webster. And this is 
the portrait Carlyle drew of him : "As a Logic- 
fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, 
one would incline to back him at first sight against 
all the extant world. The tanned complexion, 
that amorphous, crag-like face ; the dull black eyes 
under their precipice of brows, like dull anthra- 
cite furnaces, needing only to be blown; the mas- 
tiff-mouth, accurately closed : — I have not traced 
as much of silent Berserkir-rage, that I remember 
of, in any other man." 

Emerson's description and praise and criticism 
of Webster form some of the most notable pages 
in his Journal. In 1843, when Webster came to 
Concord as counsel in a famous case that was tried 
there, the fact so excited Emerson that he could 
not sleep. It was like the perturbation of a planet 
in its orbit when a large body passes near it. Em- 
erson seems to have spent much time at the court- 
house to hear and study him : " Webster quite 
fills our little town, and I doubt if I shall get set- 
tled down to writing until he has well gone from 
the county. He is a natural Emperor of men." 
He adjourned the court every day in true imperial 
fashion, simply by rising and taking his hat and 
looking the Judge coolly in the face, whereupon 
61 



THE LAST HARVEST 

the Judge " bade the Crier adjourn the Court." 
But when Emerson finally came to look upon him 
with the same feeling with which he saw one of 
those strong Paddies of the railroad, he lost his 
interest in the trial and did not return to the court 
in the afternoon. " The green fields on my way 
home were too fresh and fair, and forbade me to 
go again." 

It was with profound grief that he witnessed 
the decline of Webster's political career, owing to 
his truckling to the Southern proslavery element, 
and to his increasing intemperance. To see the 
placid, transcendental Emerson "fighting mad," 
flaring up in holy wrath, read his criticisms of 
Webster, after Webster's defection — his moral 
collapse to win the South and his support of the 
Fugitive Slave Law. This got into Emerson's 
blood and made him think " daggers and toma- 
hawks." He has this to say of a chance meeting 
with Webster in Boston, at this period : " I saw 
Webster on the street — but he was changed since 
I saw him last — black as a thunder-cloud, and 
careworn. ... I did not wonder that he de- 
pressed his eyes when he saw me and would not 
meet my face." 

In 1851 he said that some of Webster's late 
speeches and state papers were like " Hail Colum- 
bia " when sung at a slave-auction ; then be follows 
with the terrible remark : " The word liberty in 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word 
love in the mouth of a courtezan." 

The prizes or fancied prizes of politics seem to 
have corrupted all the great men of that day — 
Webster, Choate, Foote, Clay, Everett. Their 
" disgusting obsequiousness " to the South fired 
Emerson's wrath. 

XI 
The orthodox brethren of his time, and probably 
of our time also, I fancy, could make very little of 
Emerson's religion. It was the religion of the 
spirit and not of the utilitarian and matter-of-fact 
understanding. It identified man with God and 
made all nature symbolical of the spirit. He was 
never tired of repeating that all true prayers an- 
swered themselves — the spirit which the act of 
prayer begets in one's self is the answer. Your 
prayer for humility, for charity, for courage, begets 
these emotions in the mind. The devout asking 
comes from a perception of their value. Hence 
the only real prayers are for spiritual good. We 
converse with spiritual and invisible things only 
through the medium of our own hearts. The pre- 
liminary attitude of mind that moves us to face in 
this direction is the blessing. The soldier who, on 
the eve of battle, prays for courage, has already 
got what he asks for. Prayer for visible, material 
good is infidelity to the moral law. God is within 
you, more your better self than you are. Many 



THE LAST HARVEST 

prayers are a rattling of empty husks. Emerson 
says the wise man in the storm prays God, not for 
safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear. 

Although Emerson broke away from all religious 
forms, yet was there something back of them that 
he always respected, as do we all. He relates that 
one night at a hotel a stranger intruded into his 
chamber after midnight, claiming a share in it. 
" But after his lamp had smoked the chamber full, 
and I had turned round to the wall in despair, the 
man blew out his lamp, knelt down at his bedside, 
and made in low whispers a long earnest prayer. 
Then was the relation entirely changed between us. 
I fretted no more, but respected and liked him." 

Contrasting his own case with that of so many 
young men who owed their religious training ex- 
clusively to Cambridge and other public institu- 
tions, he says : " How much happier was my star 
which rained on me influence of ancestral religion. 
The depth of the religious sentiment which I knew 
in my Aunt Mary, imbuing all her genius and de- 
rived to her from such hoarded family traditions, 
from so many godly lives and godly deeds of 
sainted kindred of Concord, Maiden, York, was 
itself a culture, an education." 

xn 

A course of ten lectures which he delivered in 

Boston in February, 1840, on the " Present Age " 

gave him little pleasure. He could not warm up, 

64 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

get agitated, and so warm and agitate others: 
" A cold mechanical preparation for a delivery as 
decorous, — fine things, pretty things, wise things, 
— but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling, 
no transpiercing, no loving, no enchantment." 
Because he lacked constitutional vigor, he could 
expend only, say, twenty-one hours on each lecture, 
if he would be able and ready for the next. If he 
could only rally the lights and mights of sixty hours 
into twenty, he said, he should hate himself less. 
Self-criticism was a notable trait with him. Of 
self-praise he was never guilty. His critics and 
enemies rarely said severer things of him than he 
said of himself. He was almost morbidly conscious 
of his own defects, both as a man and as a writer. 
There are many pages of self-criticism in the 
Journals, but not one of self-praise. In 1842 he 
writes : "I have not yet adjusted my relation to 
my fellows on the planet, or to my own work. Al- 
ways too young, or too old, I do not justify myself ; 
how can I satisfy others?" Later he sighs, "If 
only I could be set aglow !" He had wished for a 
professorship, or for a pulpit, much as he reacted 
from the church — something to give him the stim- 
ulus of a stated task. Some friend recommended 
an Abolition campaign to him : "I doubt not a 
course in mobs would do me good." 

Then he refers to his faults as a writer : " I 
think I have material enough to serve my country- 
65 



THE LAST HARVEST 

men with thought and music, if only it was not 
scraps. But men do not want handfuls of gold 
dust but ingots." 

Emerson felt his own bardic character, but la- 
mented that he had so few of the bardic gifts. At 
the age of fifty-nine he says : " I am a bard 
least of bards. I cannot, like them, make lofty 
arguments in stately, continuous verse, constraining 
the rocks, trees, animals, and the periodic stars 
to say my thoughts, — for that is the gift of 
great poets ; but I am a bard because I stand near 
them, and apprehend all they utter, and with pure 
joy hear that which I also would say, and, moreover, 
I speak interruptedly words and half stanzas which 
have the like scope and aim : 

"What I cannot declare, yet cannot all withhold." 

There is certainly no over- valuation in this sen- 
tence, made when he was sixty-two : " In the ac- 
ceptance that my papers find among my thought- 
ful countrymen, in these days, I cannot help seeing 
how limited is their reading. If they read only 
the books that I do, they would not exaggerate so 
wildly." Two years before that he had said, " I 
often think I could write a criticism of Emerson 
that would hit the white." 

Emerson was a narrow-chested, steeple-shoul- 
dered man with a tendency to pulmonary disease, 
against which he made a vigorous fight all his days. 
66 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

He laments his feeble physical equipment in his 
poem, " Terminus " : 

" Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires, 
Bad husbands of their fires, 
Who, when they gave thee breath, 
Failed to bequeath 
The needful sinew stark as once, 
The Baresark marrow to thy bones, 
But left a legacy of ebbing veins, 
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins, — 
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb, 
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb." 

And yet, looking back near the end of his life, he 
says that considering all facts and conditions he 
thinks he has had triumphant health. 

XIII 
Emerson's wisdom and catholicity of spirit al- 
ways show in his treatment of the larger concerns 
of life and conduct. How remarkable is this pas- 
sage written in Puritanic New England in 1842 : 

I hear with pleasure that a young girl in the midst 
of rich, decorous Unitarian friends in Boston is well- 
nigh persuaded to join the Roman Catholic Church. 
Her friends, who are also my friends, lamented to me 
the growth of this inclination. But I told them that 
I think she is to be greatly congratulated on the event. 
She has lived in great poverty of events. In form and 
years a woman, she is still a child, having had no ex- 
periences, and although of a fine, liberal, susceptible, ex- 
panding nature, has never yet found any worthy ob- 
ject of attention ; has not been in love, nor been called 
out by any taste, except lately by music, and sadly 
wants adequate objects. In this church, perhaps, she 
shall find what she needs, in a power to call out the 

67 



THE LAST HARVEST 

slumbering religious sentiment. It is unfortunate that 
the guide who has led her into this path is a young girl 
of a lively, forcible, but quite external character, who 
teaches her the historical argument for the Catholic 
faith. I told A. that I hoped she would not be misled 
by attaching any importance to that. If the offices of 
the church attracted her, if its beautiful forms and 
humane spirit draw her, if St. Augustine and St. Ber- 
nard, Jesus and Madonna, cathedral music and masses, 
then go, for thy dear heart's sake, but do not go out of 
this icehouse of Unitarianism, all external, into an ice- 
house again of external. At all events, I charged her 
to pay no regard to dissenters, but to suck that orange 
thoroughly. 

And this on the Church and the common people 
written the year before : 

The Church aerates my good neighbors and serves 
them as a somewhat stricter and finer ablution than a 
clean shirt or a bath or a shampooing. The minister 
is a functionary and the meeting-house a functionary; 
they are one and, when they have spent all their week 
in private and selfish action, the Sunday reminds them 
of a need they have to stand again in social and public 
and ideal relations beyond neighborhood, — higher 
than the town -meeting — to their fellow men. They 
marry, and the minister who represents this high public, 
celebrates the fact; their child is baptized, and again 
they are published by his intervention. One of their 
family dies, he comes again, and the family go up pub- 
licly to the church to be publicised or churched in this 
official sympathy of mankind. It is all good as far as 
it goes. It is homage to the Ideal Church, which they 
have not : which the actual Church so foully misrepre- 
sents. But it is better so than nohow. These people 
have no fine arts, no literature, no great men to bos- 
wellize, no fine speculation to entertain their family board 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

or their solitary toil with. Their talk is of oxen and 
pigs and hay and corn and apples. Whatsoever lib- 
eral aspirations they at any time have, whatsoever 
spiritual experiences, have looked this way, and the 
Church is their fact for such things. It has not been 
discredited in their eyes as books, lectures, or living 
men of genius have been. It is still to them the accred- 
ited symbol of the religious Idea. The Church is not 
to be defended against any spiritualist clamoring for 
its reform, but against such as say it is expedient to 
shut it up and have none, this much may be said. It 
stands in the history of the present time as a high school 
for the civility and mansuetude of the people. (I 
might prefer the Church of England or of Rome as the 
medium of those superior ablutions described above, 
only that I think the Unitarian Church, like the Ly- 
ceum, as yet an open and uncommitted organ, free to 
admit the ministrations of any inspired man that shall 
pass by : whilst the other churches are committed and 
will exclude him.) 

I should add that, although this is the real account 
to be given of the church-going of the farmers and vil- 
lagers, yet it is not known to them, only felt. Do you 
not suppose that it is some benefit to a young villager 
who comes out of the woods of New Hampshire to Bos- 
ton and serves his apprenticeship in a shop, and now 
opens his own store, to hang up his name in bright gold 
letters a foot long ? His father could not write his 
name : it is only lately that he could : the name is mean 
and unknown : now the sun shines on it : all men, all 
women, fairest eyes read it. It is a fact in the great 
city. Perhaps he shall be successful and make it 
wider known : shall leave it greatly brightened to his 
son. His son may be head of a party : governor of 
the state : a poet : a powerful thinker : and send the 
knowledge of this name over the habitable earth. By 
all these suggestions, he is at least made responsible 



THE LAST HARVEST 

and thoughtful by his public relation of a seen and 
aerated name. 

Let him modestly accept those hints of a more beau- 
tiful life which he meets with ; how to do with few and 
easily gotten things : but let him seize with enthusiasm 
the opportunity of doing what he can, for the virtues 
are natural to each man and the talents are little per- 
fections. 

Let him hope infinitely with a patience as large as 
the sky. 

Nothing is so young and untaught as time. 

How wise is his saying that we do not turn to 
the books of the Bible — St. Paul and St. John -*- to 
start us on our task, as we do to Marcus Aurelius, 
or the Lives of the philosophers, or to Plato, or 
Plutarch, "because the Bible wears black clothes" ! 
" It comes with a certain official claim against which 
the mind revolts. The Bible has its own nobilities 
— might well be charming if left simply on its merits, 
as other books are, but this, 'You must,' ' It is your 
duty,' in connection with it, repels. 'T is like the 
introduction of martial law into Concord. If you 
should dot our farms with picket lines, and I could 
not go or come across lots without a pass, I should 
resist, or else emigrate. If Concord were as beauti- 
ful as Paradise, it would be as detestable to me." 

In his essays and letters Emerson gives one 
the impression of never using the first words that 
come to mind, nor the second, but the third or 
fourth; always a sense of selection, of deliberate 
choice. To use words in a novel way, and impart 
70 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

a" little thrill of surprise, seemed to be his aim. 
This effort of selection often mars his page. He 
is rarely carried away by his thought, but he snares 
or captures it with a word. He does not feel first 
and think second; he thinks first, and the feeling 
does not always follow. He dearly loved writing ; 
it was the joy of his life, but it was a conscious 
intellectual effort. It was often a kind of walking 
on stilts ; his feet are not on the common ground. 
And yet — and yet — what a power he was, and 
how precious his contributions ! 

He says in his Journal, " I have observed long 
since that to give the thought a full and just ex- 
pression I must not prematurely utter it." This 
hesitation, this studied selection robs him of the 
grace of felicity and spontaneity. The compensa- 
tion is often a sense of novelty and a thrill of 
surprise. Moreover, he avoids the commonplace 
and the cheap and tedious. His product is always 
a choice one, and is seen to have a quality of its 
own. No page has more individuality than his, 
and none is so little like the page of the ordinary 
professional writer. 

'Tis a false note to speak of Emerson's doctrines, 
as Henry James did. He had no doctrines. He 
had leading ideas, but he had no system, no ar- 
gument. It was his attitude of mind and spirit 
that was significant and original. He would have 
nothing to do with stereotyped opinions. What 
71 



THE LAST HARVEST 

he said to-day might contradict what he said yes- 
terday, or what he might say to-morrow. No 
matter, the spirit was the same. Truth is a sphere 
that has opposite poles. Emerson more than any 
other writer stood for the contradictory character 
of spiritual truth. Truth is what we make it — 
what takes the imprint of one's mind ; it is not a 
definite something like gold or silver, it is any state- 
ment that fits our mental make-up, that comes home 
to us. What comes home in one mood may not 
come home in another. 

Emerson had no creed, he had no definite ideas 
about God. Personality and impersonality might 
both be affirmed of Absolute Being, and what may 
not be affirmed of it in our own minds ? 

The good of such a man as Emerson is not in 
his doctrines, but in his spirit, his heroic attitude, 
his consonance with the universal mind. His 
thought is a tremendous solvent; it digests and 
renders fluid the hard facts of life and experience. 

XIV 

Emerson records in his Journal : "I have been 
writing and speaking what were once called novel- 
ties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have not 
now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said 
was not true ; not that it has not found intelligent 
receivers ; but because it did not go from any wish 
in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. 
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EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

I delight in driving them from me. What could 
I do, if they came to me ? — they would interrupt 
and encumber me. This is my boast that I have 
no school follower. I should account it a measure 
of the impurity of insight, if it did not create inde- 
pendence." 

It is never easy to stray far from the master in 
high moral, aesthetic, and literary matters and be 
on the safe side ; we are only to try to escape his 
individual bias, to break over his limitations and 
" brave the landscape's look " with our own eyes. 
We are to be more on guard against his affinities, 
his unconscious attractions and repulsions, than 
against his ethical and intellectual conclusions, if 
one may make that distinction, which I know is 
hazardous business. We readily impose our own 
limitations upon others and see the world as old 
when we are old. 

Emerson criticized Carlyle because Carlyle was 
not Emerson, just as Carlyle criticized Emerson be- 
cause he was not Carlyle. We are all poor beggars 
in this respect ; each of us is the victim of his own 
demon. Beware of the predilection of the master ! 
When his temperament impels him he is no longer 
a free man. 

We touch Emerson's limitations in his failure to 

see anything in Hawthorne's work ; they had " no 

inside to them " ; "it would take him and Alcott 

together to make a man " ; and, again, in his 

73 



THE LAST HARVEST 

rather contemptuous disposal of Poe as " the jin- 
gle man" and his verdict upon Shelley as " never 
a poet"! The intellectual content of Shelley's 
work is not great ; but that he was not a poet, in 
fact that he was anything else but a poet, though 
not of the highest order, is contrary to the truth, I 
think. Limitations like this are not infrequent in 
Emerson. Yet Emerson was a great critic of men 
and of books. A highly interesting volume show- 
ing him in this character could be compiled from 
the Journals. 

Emerson and Hawthorne were near neighbors 
for several years. Emerson liked the man better 
than his books. They once had a good long walk 
together ; they walked to Harvard village and back, 
occupying a couple of days and walking about 
twenty miles a day. They had much conversa- 
tion — talked of Scott and Landor and others. 
They found the bar-rooms at the inns cold and dull 
places. The Temperance Society had emptied 
them. Hawthorne tried to smoke a cigar in one 
of them, but "was soon out on the piazza." Haw- 
thorne, Emerson said, was more inclined to play Jove 
than Mercury. It is a pleasing picture — these 
two men, so unlike, but both typical of New Eng- 
land and both men of a high order of genius, walk- 
ing in friendly converse along the country roads in 
the golden September days over seventy years ago. 
Emerson always regretted that he never succeeded 
74 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

in " conquering a friendship " with Hawthorne, 
mainly because they had so few traits in common. 
To the satisfaction of silent intercourse with men 
Emerson was clearly a stranger. There must be 
an interchange of ideas; the feeling of comrade- 
ship, the communion of congenial souls was not 
enough. Hawthorne, shy, silent, rather gloomy, 
yet there must have been a charm about his mere 
presence that more than made up for his want of 
conversation. His silence was golden. Emerson 
was a transcendental Yankee and was always bent 
on driving sharp bargains in the interchange of 
ideas with the persons he met. He did not pro- 
pose to swap horses or watches or jack-knives, but 
he would swap ideas with you day in and day out. 
If you had no ideas to swap, he lost interest in you. 

The wisdom of a great creative artist like Haw- 
thorne does not necessarily harden into bright epi- 
grammatic sayings or rules for the conduct of life, 
and the available intellectual content of his works 
to the Emersonian type of mind may be small; 
but his interior, his emotional and imaginative 
richness may much more than make it up. The 
scholar, the sayer of things, must always rank be- 
low the creator, or the maker of things. 

Philosophers contradict themselves like other 

mortals. Here and there in his Journals Emerson 

rails against good nature, and says " tomahawks 

are better." " Why should they call me good- 

75 



THE LAST HARVEST 

natured? I, too, like puss, have a tractile claw." 
And he declares that he likes the sayers of No bet- 
ter than the sayers of Yes, and that he preferred 
hard clouds, hard expressions, and hard manners. 
In another mood, or from another point of view, 
he says of a man, " Let him go into his closet and 
pray the Divinity to make him so great as to be 
good-natured." And again, " How great it is to 
do a little, as, for instance, to deserve the praise of 
good nature, or of humility, or of punctuality." 

Emerson's characterization of himself as always 
a painter is interesting. People, he said, came to 
his lectures with expectation that he was to realize 
the Republic he described, and they ceased to come 
when they found this reality no nearer : " They 
mistook me. I am and always was a painter. I 
paint still with might and main and choose the 
best subject I can. Many have I seen come and 
go with false hopes and fears, and dubiously af- 
fected by my pictures. But I paint on." " I por- 
tray the ideal, not the real," he might have added. 
He was a poet-seer and not a historian. He was 
a painter of ideas, as Carlyle was a painter of men 
and events. Always is there an effort at vivid 
and artistic expression. If his statement does not 
kindle the imagination, it falls short of his aim. 
He visualizes his most subtle and abstract con- 
ceptions — sees the idea wedded to its correlative 
in the actual world. A new figure, a fresh simile 
76 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

gave him a thrill of pleasure. He went hawking 
up and down the fields of science, of trade, of agri- 
culture, of nature, seeking them. He thinks in 
symbols, he paints his visions of the ideal with 
pigments drawn from the world all about him. To 
call such men as Emerson and Carlyle painters is 
only to emphasize their artistic temperaments. 
Their seriousness, their devotion to high moral and 
intellectual standards, only lift them, as they do 
Whitman, out of the world of mere decorative art 
up to the world of heroic and creative art where 
art as such does not obtrude itself. 

XV 

Emerson wonders why it is that man eating does 
not attract the imagination or attract the artist: 
" Why is our diet and table not agreeable to the 
imagination, whilst all other creatures eat without 
shame? We paint the bird pecking at fruit, the 
browsing ox, the lion leaping on his prey, but no 
painter ever ventured to draw a man eating. The 
difference seems to consist in the presence or ab- 
sence of the world at the feast. The diet is base, 
be it what it may, that is hidden in caves or cellars 
or houses. ... Did you ever eat your bread on 
the top of a mountain, or drink water there ? Did 
you ever camp out with lumbermen or travellers 
in the prairie ? Did you ever eat the poorest rye 
or oatcake with a beautiful maiden in the wilder- 
77 



THE LAST HARVEST 

ness ? and did you not find that the mixture of sun 
and sky with your bread gave it a certain mundane 
savour and comeliness ? " 

I do not think Emerson hits on the true explana- 
tion of why man feeding is not an attractive sub- 
ject for the painter. It is not that the diet is base 
and is hidden in caves and cellars, or that the world 
is not present at the feast. It is because eating 
is a purely selfish animal occupation; there is no 
touch of the noble or the idyllic or the heroic in it. 
In the act man confesses his animal nature; he is 
no longer an Emerson, a Dante, a Plato — he is 
simply a physiological contrivance taking in nu- 
triment. The highest and the lowest are for the 
moment on the same level. The lady and her maid, 
the lord and his lackey are all one. Eating your 
bread on a mountain-top or in the camp of lumber- 
men or with a beautiful maiden in the wilder- 
ness adds a new element. Here the picture has 
all nature for a background and the imagination 
is moved. The rye and the oatcake now become 
a kind of heavenly manna, or, as Fitzgerald has it, 
under such conditions the wilderness is Paradise 
enow. The simple act of feeding does not now 
engross the attention. Associate with the act of 
eating any worthy or noble idea, and it is at once 
lifted to a higher level. A mother feeding her child, 
a cook passing food to the tramp at the door or to 
other hungry and forlorn wayfarers, or soldiers 
78 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

pausing to eat their rations in the field, or fishermen 
beside the stream, or the haymakers with their 
lunch under a tree — in all such incidents there are 
pictorial elements because the least part of it all to 
the looker-on is the act of eating. 

In Da Vinci's " Last Supper " the mere animal 
act of taking food plays no part ; the mind is oc- 
cupied with higher and more significant things. A 
suggestion of wine or of fruit in a painting may be 
agreeable, but from a suggestion of the kitchen and 
the cook we turn away. The incident of some of 
Washington's officers during the Revolution en- 
tertaining some British officers (an historical fact) 
on baked potatoes and salt would appeal to the 
artistic imagination. All the planting and reaping 
of the farmers is suggestive of our animal wants, 
as is so much of our whole industrial activity ; but 
art looks kindly upon much of it, shows us more or 
less in partnership with primal energies. People 
surrounding a table after all signs of the dinner 
have been removed hold the elements of an agree^ 
able picture, because that suggests conversation and 
social intercourse — a feast of reason and a flow of 
soul. We are no longer animals ; we have moved up 
many degrees higher in the scale of human values. 

Emerson's deep love and admiration for Carlyle 

come out many times in the Journals. No other 

literary man of his times moved and impressed 

him so profoundly. Their correspondence, which 

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THE LAST HARVEST 

lasted upwards of forty years, is the most valuable 
correspondence known to me in English literature. 
It is a history of the growth and development of 
these two remarkable minds. 

I lately reread the Correspondence, mainly to 
bring my mind again in contact with these noble 
spirits, so much more exalted than any in our own 
time, but partly to see what new light the letters 
threw upon the lives of these two men. 

There is little of the character of intimate and 
friendly letters in these remarkable documents. 
It is not Dear Tom or Dear Waldo. It is 
Dear Emerson or Dear Carlyle. They are not 
letters, they are epistles, like Paul's Epistle to 
the Ephesians, or to the Thessalonians, or to the 
Romans. Each of them contains the fragments 
of a gospel that both were preaching, each in his 
own way, but at bottom the same — the beauty 
and majesty of the moral law. Let the heavens fall, 
the moral law and our duty to God and man will 
stand. These two men, so different in character 
and temperament, were instantly drawn together 
by that magnet — the moral sentiment. Carlyle's 
works were occupied almost entirely with men — 
with history, biography, political events, and 
government; Emerson's with ideas, nature, and 
poetry ; yet the bed rock in each was the same. 
Both preached an evangel, but how different ! 

Emerson makes a note of the days on which he 
80 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

received a letter from, or wrote one to, his great 
Scottish friend. Both were important events with 
him. It is evident that Emerson makes more of 
an effort to write his best in these letters than 
does Carlyle. Carlyle tosses his off with more ease 
and unconscious mastery. The exchange is al- 
ways in favor of the Scot. Carlyle was, of course, 
the more prodigious personality, and had the ad- 
vantage in the richness and venerableness of the 
Old World setting. But Emerson did not hesitate 
to discount him in his letters and in his Journals, 
very wisely sometimes, not so wisely at others. 

" O Carlyle, the merit of glass is not to be 
seen, but to be seen through; but every crystal 
and lamina of the Carlyle glass is visible." Of 
course Carlyle might reply that stained glass has 
other merits than transparency, or he might ask : 
Why should an author's style be compared to glass 
anyhow, since it is impossible to dissociate it from 
the matter of his discourse? It is not merely to 
reveal truth; it is also to enhance its beauty. 
There is the charm and witchery of style, as in 
Emerson's own best pages, as well as the worth of 
the subject-matter. Is it not true that in the de- 
scription of any natural object or scene or event 
we want something more than to see it through 
a perfectly transparent medium? We want the 
added charm or illusion of the writer's own way of 
seeing it, the hue of his own spirit. 
81 



THE LAST HARVEST 

I think we may admit all this — doubtless Emer- 
son would admit it — and yet urge that Carlyle's 
style had many faults of the kind Emerson indi- 
cated. It thrusts itself too much upon the reader's 
attention. His prose is at the best, as in the " Life 
of Stirling," when it is most transparent 1 and freest 
from mannerisms. Carlyle's manner at its best is 
very pleasing ; at its worst it becomes a wearisome 
mannerism. When a writer's style gets into a rut 
his reader is not happy. Ease, flexibility, trans- 
parency, though it be colored transparency, are 
among the merits we want. 

The most just and penetrating thing Emerson 
ever said about Carlyle is recorded in his Journal 
in 1847 : " In Carlyle, as in Byron, one is much 
more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. 
He has manly superiority rather than intellectuality, 
and so makes good hard hits all the time. There 
is more character than intellect in every sentence, 
herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson." 
Criticism like this carries the force and conviction 
of a scientific analysis. 

The Journals abound in similar illuminating bits 
of criticism directed to nearly all the more noted 
authors of English literature, past and present. 
In science we do want an absolutely colorless, trans- 
parent medium, but in literature the personality 
of the writer is everything. The born writer gives 
us facts and ideas steeped in his own quality as a 
82 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

man. Take out of Carlyle's works, or out of Emer- 
son's, or out of Arnold's, the savor of the man's 
inborn quality — the savor of that which acts over 
and above his will — and we have robbed them 
of their distinctive quality. Literature is always 
truth of some sort, plus a man. No one knew 
this better than Emerson himself. Another re- 
mark of Emerson's, made when he was twenty- 
seven years old, has high literary value : 

" There is no beauty in words except in their 
collocation." 

It is not beautiful words that make beautiful 
poetry, or beautiful prose, but ordinary words 
beautifully arranged. The writer who hopes by 
fine language to invoke fine ideas is asking the 
tailor to turn him out a fine man. First get your 
great idea, and you will find it is already fitly 
clothed. The image of the clothes in this connec- 
tion is, of course, a very inadequate and mislead- 
ing one, since language is the thought or its vital 
integument, and not merely its garment. We 
often praise a writer for his choice of words, and 
Emerson himself says in the same paragraph from 
which I quote the above : " No man can write well 
who thinks there is no choice of words for him." 
There is always a right word and every other than 
that is wrong. There is always the best word, or 
the best succession of words to give force and vivid- 
ness to the idea. All painters use the same colors, 
83 



THE LAST HARVEST 

all musicians use the same notes, all sculptors use 
the same marble, all architects use the same ma- 
terials and all writers use essentially the same 
words, their arrangement and combination alone 
making the difference in the various products. 
Nature uses the same elements in her endless vari- 
ety of living things; their different arrangement 
and combinations, and some interior necessity 
which we have to call the animating principle, is 
the secret of the individuality of each. 

Of course we think in words or images, and no 
man can tell which is first, or if there is any first 
in such matters — the thought or the word — any 
more than the biochemist can tell us which is first 
in the living body, the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, 
and so on, or the living force that weaves itself a 
corporeal garment out of these elements, i 

XVI 

Emerson hungered for the quintessence of things, 
their last concentrated, intensified meanings, for 
the pith and marrow of men and events, and not 
for their body and bulk. He wanted the ottar of 
roses and not a rose garden, the diamond and not 
a mountain of carbon. This bent gives a peculiar 
beauty and stimulus to his writings, while at the 
same time it makes the reader crave a little more 
body and substance. The succulent leaf and stalk 
of certain garden vegetables is better to one's lik- 
84 



EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS 

ing than the more pungent seed. If Emerson 
could only have given us the essence of Father 
Taylor's copious, eloquent, flesh-and-blood dis- 
courses, how it would have delighted us ! or if he 
could only have got the silver out of Alcott's 
bewitching moonshine — that would have been 
worth while ! 

But why wish Emerson had been some other 
than he was? He was at least the quintessence 
of New England Puritanism, its last and deepest 
meaning and result, lifted into the regions of ethics 
and aesthetics. 



85 



II 

FLIES IN AMBER 

It has been the fashion among our younger writers 
to speak slightingly and flippantly of Emerson, 
referring to him as outworn, and as the apostle of 
the obvious. This view is more discreditable to 
the young people than is their criticism damaging 
to Emerson. It can make little difference to Em- 
erson's fame, but it would be much more becoming 
in our young writers to garland his name with 
flowers than to utter these harsh verdicts. 

It is undoubtedly true that Emerson entered 
into and influenced the lives of more choice spirits, 
both men and women, during the past generation 
than did any other American author. Whether 
he still does so would be interesting to know. We 
who have felt his tonic and inspiring influence can 
but hope so. Yet how impossible he seems in 
times like these in which we live, when the stars 
of the highest heaven of the spirit which illumine 
his page are so obscured or blotted out by the dust 
and the fog of our hurrying, materialistic age ! 
Try to think of Emerson spending a winter going 
about the Western States reading to miscellaneous 
audiences essays like those that now make up 
86 



FLIES IN AMBER 

his later volumes. What chance would he stand, 
even in university towns, as against the " movies " 
(a word so ugly I hesitate to write it) in the next 
street ? 

I once defended Emerson against a criticism of 
Matthew Arnold's. It is true, as Arnold says, 
that Emerson is not a great writer, except on rare 
occasions. Now and then, especially in his ear- 
lier essays, there is logical texture and cohesion in 
his pages; development, evolution, growth; one 
thing follows another naturally, and each para- 
graph follows from what went before. But most 
of his later writings are a kind of patchwork ; un- 
related ideas are in juxtaposition; the incongrui- 
ties are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, 
were read as lectures to miscellaneous audiences 
in which the attention soon became tired or 
blunted if required to follow a closely reasoned ar- 
gument. Pictures and parables and startling affir- 
mations suited better. Emerson did not stoop to 
his audience; there was no condescension in him. 
The last time I heard him, which was in Wash- 
ington in the early seventies, his theme was " Man- 
ners," and much of it passed over the heads of 
his audience. 

Certain of Emerson's works must strike the av- 
erage reader, when he first looks into them, as a 
curious medley of sense and wild extravagance, 
utterly lacking in the logical sequence of the best 
87 



THE LAST HARVEST 

prose, and often verging on the futile and the ab- 
surd. Yet if one does not get discouraged, one 
will soon see running through them veins of the 
purest gold of the spirit, and insight into Nature's 
ways, that redeem and more than redeem them. 

I recall that when, as a young man, I looked into 
them the first time, I could make nothing of them. 
I was fresh from reading the standard essayists 
and philosophers of English literature — Addison, 
Steele, Cowley, Johnson, Locke — and the poems of 
Pope, Young, and Cowper, all of ethical import 
and value, and sometimes didactic, but never mys- 
tical and transcendental, and the plunge into Em- 
erson was a leap into a strange world. But a few 
years later, when I opened his essays again, they 
were like spring- water to parched lips. Now, in 
my old age, I go back to him with a half-sad pleas- 
ure, as one goes back to the scenes of one's youth. 

Emerson taught us a mingled poetic and pro- 
phetic way of looking at things that stays with us. 
The talented English woman Anne Gilchrist said 
we had outgrown Emerson; had absorbed all he 
had to give us ; and were leaving him behind. Of 
course he was always a teacher and preacher, in 
the thrall of his priestly inheritance, and to that 
extent we leave him behind as we do not leave be- 
hind works of pure literature. 

As to continuity, some of his essays have much 
more of it than others. In his " Nature " the 
88 



FLIES IN AMBER 

theme is unfolded, there is growth and evolution; 
and his first and second series of Essays likewise 
show it. The essays on " Character," on " Self- 
Reliance," on the " Over-Soul," meet the require- 
ments of sound prose. And if there is any sounder 
prose than can be found in his " Nature," or in his 
" English Traits," or in his historical and biograph- 
ical addresses, I do not know where to find it. 
How flat and commonplace seem the works of 
some of the masters of prose to whom Arnold 
alludes — Cicero, Voltaire, Addison, Swift — com- 
pared with those of Emerson ! A difference like 
that between the prismatic hues of raindrops sus- 
pended from a twig or a trellis in the sunlight and 
the water in the spring or the brook. 

But in Emerson's later work there is, as geolo- 
gists say, nonconformity between the strata which 
make up his paragraphs. There is only juxta- 
position. Among his later papers the one on 
" Wealth " flows along much more than the one 
on " Fate." Emerson believed in wealth. Pov- 
erty did not attract him. It was not suited to his 
cast of mind. Poverty was humiliating. Emer- 
son accumulated a fortune, and it added to his self- 
respect. Thoreau's pride in his poverty must have 
made Emerson shiver. 

Although Arnold refused to see in Emerson a 
great writer, he did admit that he was eminent as 
the " friend and aider of those who would live in 
89 



THE LAST HARVEST 

the spirit " ; but Arnold apparently overlooked the 
fact that, devoid of the merit of good literature, 
no man's writings could have high spiritual value. 
Strip the Bible of its excellence as literature, and 
you have let out its life-blood. Literature is not 
a varnish or a polish. It is not a wardrobe. It 
is the result of a vital, imaginative relation of the 
man to his subject. And Emerson's subject-mat- 
ter at its best always partakes of the texture of his 
own mind. It is admitted that there are times 
when his writing lacks organization, — the vital 
ties, — when his rhetoric is more like a rocking- 
horse or a merry-go-round than like the real thing. 
But there are few writers who do not mark time 
now and then, and Emerson is no exception; and 
I contend that at his best his work has the sequence 
and evolution of all great prose. And yet, let me 
say that if Emerson's power and influence de- 
pended upon his logic, he would be easily disposed 
of. Fortunately they do not. They depend, let me 
repeat, upon his spiritual power and insight, and 
the minor defects I am pointing out are only like 
flies in amber. 

He thought in images more strictly than any 
other contemporary writer, and was often desper- 
ately hard-put to it to make his thought wed his 
image. He confessed that he did not know how to 
argue, and that he could only say what he saw. But 
he had spiritual vision ; we cannot deny this, though 
90 



FLIES IN AMBER 

we do deny him logical penetration. I doubt if there 
ever was a writer of such wide and lasting influence 
as Emerson, in whom the logical sense was so feeble 
and shadowy. He had in this respect a feminine in- 
stead of a masculine mind, an intuitional instead 
of a reasoning one. It made up in audacious, often 
extravagant, affirmations what it lacked in syl- 
logistic strength. The logical mind, with its sense 
of fitness and proportion, does not strain or over- 
strain the thread that knits the parts together. It 
does not jump to conclusions, but reaches them 
step by step. The flesh and blood of feeling and 
sentiment may clothe the obscure framework of 
logic, but the logic is there all the same. Emerson's 
mind was as devoid of logical sense as are our re- 
membered dreams, or as Christian Science is of sci- 
ence. He said that truth ceased to be such when 
polemically stated. Occasionally he amplifies and 
unfolds an idea, as in the essays already mentioned, 
but generally his argument is a rope of sand. Its 
strength is the strength of the separate particles. 
He is perpetually hooking things together that do 
not go together. It is like putting an apple on a 
pumpkin vine, or an acorn on a hickory. " A club 
foot and a club wit." " Why should we fear," he 
says, "to be crushed by the same elements — we 
who are made up of the same elements?" But 
were we void of fear, we should be crushed much 
oftener than we are. The electricity in our bodies 
91 



THE LAST HARVEST 

does not prevent us from being struck by light- 
ning, nor the fluids in our bodies prevent the waters 
from drowning us, nor the carbon in our bodies 
prevent carbon dioxide from poisoning us. 

One of Emerson's faults as a writer arose from 
his fierce hunger for analogy. " I would rather 
have a good symbol of my thought," he confesses, 
" than the suffrage of Kant or of Plato." " All 
thinking is analogizing, and it is the use of life to 
learn metonymy." His passion for analogy be- 
trays him here and there in his Journals, as in this 
passage : " The water we wash with never speaks 
of itself, nor does fire or wind or tree. Neither 
does a noble natural man," and so forth. If water 
and fire and wind and tree were in the habit of 
talking of anything else, this kind of a comparison 
would not seem so spurious. 

A false note in rhetoric like the above you will 
find in Emerson oftener than a false note in taste. 
I find but one such in the Journals : "As soon as 
a man gets his suction-hose down into the great 
deep, he belongs to no age, but is an eternal man." 
That I call an ignoble image, and one cannot con- 
ceive of Emerson himself printing such a passage. 

We hear it said that Whittier is the typical poet 
of New England. It may be so, but Emerson is 
much the greater poet. Emerson is a poet of the 
world, while Whittier's work is hardly known 
abroad at all. Emerson is known wherever the 



FLIES IN AMBER 

English language is spoken. Not that Emerson 
is in any sense a popular poet, such as, for example, 
Burns or Byron, but he is the poet of the choice 
few, of those who seek poetry that has some in- 
tellectual or spiritual content. Whit tier wrote 
many happy descriptions of New England scenes 
and seasons. " The Tent on the Beach " and 
" Snow-Bound " come readily to mind ; * The 
Playmate " is a sweet poem, full of tender and 
human affection, but not a great poem. Whittier 
had no profundity. Is not a Quaker poet neces- 
sarily narrow? Whittier gave voice to the New 
England detestation of slavery, but by no means 
so forcibly and profoundly as did Emerson. He 
had a theology, but not a philosophy. I wonder 
if his poems are still read. 

In his chapter called " Considerations by the 
Way," Emerson strikes this curious false note in 
his rhetoric : " We have a right to be here or we 
should not be here. We have the same right to 
be here that Cape Cod and Sandy Hook have to 
be there." As if Cape Cod or Cape Horn or Sandy 
Hook had any " rights " ! This comparison of 
man with inanimate things occurs in both Emerson 
and Thoreau. Thoreau sins in this way at least 
once when he talks of the Attic wit of burning 
thorns and briars. There is a similar false note 
in such a careful writer as Dean Swift. He says 
to his young poet, " You are ever to try a good 



THE LAST HARVEST 

poem as you would a sound pipkin, and if it rings 
well upon the knuckle, be sure there is no flaw in 
it." Whitman compares himself with 1 an inani- 
mate thing in the line : 

"I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my 
house by." 

But he claims no moral or human attributes or 
rights for his level ; it simply acts in obedience to 
the principle it embodies — the law of gravitation. 

The lecturer " gets away " with such things 
better than the writer. An audience is not criti- 
cal about such matters, but the reader takes note 
of them. Mosaics will do on the platform, or in 
the pulpit, but will not bear the nearer view of the 
study. 

The incongruities of Emerson are seen in such 
passages as this : " Each plant has its parasites, 
and each created thing its lover and poet," as if 
there were any relation between the two clauses of 
this sentence — between parasites and lovers and 
poets ! As if one should say, " Woodchucks are 
often alive with fleas, and our fruit trees bloom in 
May." 

i Emerson was so emboldened by what had been 
achieved through the mastery of the earth's forces 
that he was led to say that " a wise geology shall 
yet make the earthquake harmless, and the vol- 
cano an agricultural resource." But this seems 
expecting too much. We have harnessed the 
94 



FLIES IN AMBER 

lightnings, but the earthquake is too deep and too 
mighty for us. It is a steed upon which we cannot 
lay our hands. The volcano we may draw upon 
for heat and steam, as we do upon the winds and 
streams for power, but it is utterly beyond our 
control. The bending of the earth's crust beneath 
the great atmospheric waves is something we cannot 
bridle. The tides by sea as by land are beyond us. 

Emerson had the mind of the prophet and 
the seer, and was given to bold affirmations. 
The old Biblical distinction between the scribes 
and the man who speaks with authority still 
holds. We may say of all other New England essay- 
ists and poets — Lowell, Whipple, Tuckerman, 
Holmes, Hillard, Whittier, Longfellow — that they 
are scribes only. Emerson alone speaks as one 
having authority — the authority of the spirit. 
" Thus saith the Lord " — it is this tone that gives 
him his authority the world over. 

I never tire of those heroic lines of his in which 

he sounds a battle-cry to the spirit : 

"Though love repine, and reason chafe, 
There came a voice without reply, — 
' 'T is man's perdition to be safe, 
When for the truth he ought to die.'" 

The last time I saw Emerson was at the Holmes 
seventieth-birthday breakfast in 1879. The serious 
break in his health had resulted in a marked apha- 
sia, so that he could not speak the name of his 
nearest friend, nor answer the simplest question. 
95 



THE LAST HARVEST 

Yet he was as serene as ever. Let the heavens 
fall — what matters it to me ? his look seemed to 
say. 

Emerson's face had in it more of what we call 
the divine than had that of any other author of 
his time — that wonderful, kindly, wise smile — 
the smile of the soul — not merely the smile of 
good nature, but the smile of spiritual welcome 
and hospitality. 

Emerson had quality. A good Emersonian will 
recognize any passage from the Sage in a book of 
quotations, even if no name is appended. 

We speak of Emerson as outgrown, yet only 
yesterday I saw in J. Arthur Thomson's recent 
GifTord Lectures on " The System of Animate Na- 
ture," repeated quotations from Emerson, mainly 
from his poetry. I think he is no more likely to 
be outgrown than are Wordsworth and Arnold. 
Yet I do not set the same value upon his poetry 
that I do upon that of Wordsworth at his best. 

Emerson is the last man we should expect to be 
guilty of misinterpreting Nature, yet he does so at 
times. He does so in this passage : "If Nature 
wants a thumb, she makes it at the cost of the 
arms and legs." As if the arm were weaker or 
less efficient because of the thumb. What would 
man's power be as a tool-using animal without his 
strong, opposable thumb? His grasp would be 
gone. 



FLIES IN AMBER 

He says truly that the gruesome, the disgust- 
ing, the repellent are not fit subjects for cabinet 
pictures. The " sacred subjects " to which he 
objects probably refer to the Crucifixion — the 
nails through the hands and feet, and the crown of 
thorns. But to jump from that fact to the asser- 
tion that Nature covers up the skeleton on the 
same grounds, is absurd. Do not all vertebrates 
require an osseous system? In the radiates and 
articulates she puts the bony system on the out- 
side, but when she comes to her backbone animals, 
she perforce puts her osseous system beneath. 
She weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh 
and skin and hair over it, not to hide it, but to use 
it. Would you have a man like a jellyfish ? 

The same want of logic marks Carlyle's mind 
when he says : " The drop by continually falling 
bores its way through the hardest rock. The hasty 
torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and 
leaves no trace behind." But give the " hasty 
torrent " the same time you give the drop, and see 
what it will do to the rock ! 

Emerson says, " A little more or a little less 
does not signify anything." But it does signify 
in this world of material things. Is one man as 
impressive as an army, one tree as impressive as a 
forest ? " Scoop a little water in the hollow of 
your palm ; take up a handful of shore sand ; well, 
these are the elements. What is the beach but 
97 



THE LAST HARVEST 

acres of sand? what is the ocean but cubic miles 
of water? A little more or a little less signifies 
nothing.'* It is the mass that does impress us, as 
Niagara does, as the midnight sky does. It is not 
as parts of this " astonishing astronomy," or as a 
" part of the round globe under the optical sky " 
— we do not think of that, but the imagination is 
moved by the vast sweep of the ocean and its 
abysmal depths, and its ceaseless rocking. In some 
cases we see the All in the little; the law that 
spheres a tear spheres a globe. That Nature is 
seen in leasts is an old Latin maxim. The soap 
bubble explains the rainbow. Steam from the 
boiling kettle gave Watt the key to the steam en- 
gine ; but a tumbler of water throws no light on the 
sea, though its sweating may help explain the rain. 

Emerson quotes Goethe as saying, " The beau- 
tiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature 
which, but for this appearance, had been forever 
concealed from us." As if beauty were an ob- 
jective reality instead of a subjective experience ! 
As if it were something out there in the landscape 
that you may gather your arms full of and bring in ! 
If you are an artist, you may bring in your vision 
of it, pass it through your own mind, and thus em- 
balm and preserve the beauty. Or if you are a 
poet, you may have a similar experience and re- 
produce it, humanized, in a poem. But the beauty 
is always a distilled and re-created, or, shall we 
98 



FLIES IN AMBER 

say, an incarnated beauty — a tangible and meas- 
urable something, like moisture in the air, or 
sugar in the trees, or quartz in the rocks. There 
is, and can be, no " science of beauty." Beauty, 
like truth, is an experience of the mind. It is the 
emotion you feel when in health you look from 
your door or window of a May morning. If you 
are ill, or oppressed with grief, or worried, you will 
hardly experience the emotion of the beautiful. 

Emerson said he was warned by the fate of many 
philosophers not to attempt a definition of beauty. 
But in trying to describe it and characterize it he 
ran the same risk. " We ascribe beauty to that 
which is simple," he said ; " which has no super- 
fluous parts ; which exactly answers its end ; which 
stands related to all things ; which is the mean of 
many extremes." Is a boot-jack beautiful? Is 
a crow-bar? Yet these are simple, they have no 
superfluous parts, they exactly serve their ends, 
they stand related to all things through the laws of 
chemistry and physics. A flower is beautiful, a 
shell on the beach is beautiful, a tree in full leaf, 
or in its winter nudity, is beautiful; but these 
things are not very simple. Complex things may 
be beautiful also. A village church may be beau- 
tiful no less than a Gothic cathedral. Emerson 
was himself a beautiful writer, a beautiful char- 
acter, and his works are a priceless addition to lit- 
erature. 

99 



THE LAST HARVEST 

" Go out of the house to see the moon," says 
Emerson, " and it is mere tinsel ; it will not please 
as when its light shines upon your necessary jour- 
ney." This is not true in my experience. The 
stars do not become mere tinsel, do they, when 
we go out to look at the overwhelming spectacle ? 
Neither does the moon. Is it not a delight in it- 
self to look at the full moon X- 

"The vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue," 

as Whitman says ? 

"The moon doth look round her with delight when the heavens 
are bare," 

says Wordsworth, and equally with delight do 
we regard the spectacle. The busy farmer in 
the fields rarely sees the beauty of Nature. He 
has not the necessary detachment. Put him be- 
hind his team and plough in the spring and he 
makes a pleasing picture to look upon, but the 
mind must be open to take in the beauty of Na- 
ture. 

Of course Emerson is only emphasizing the fact 
of the beauty of utility, of the things we do, of the 
buildings we put up for use, and not merely for 
show. A hut, a log cabin in a clearing, a farmer's 
unpainted barn, all have elements of beauty. A 
man leading a horse to water, or foddering his 
cattle from a stack in a snow-covered field, or fol- 
lowing his plough, is always pleasing. Every day 
I pass along a road by a wealthy man's estate and 
100 



FLIES IN AMBER 

see a very elaborate stone wall of cobblestones and 
cement which marks the boundary of his estate on 
the highway. The wall does not bend and un- 
dulate with the inequalities of the ground ; its top 
is as level as a foundation wall ; it is an offense to 
every passer-by ; it has none of the simplicity that 
should mark a division wall ; it is studied and elab- 
orate, and courts your admiration. How much 
more pleasing a rough wall of field stone, or " wild 
stone," as our old wall-layer put it, with which 
the farmer separates his fields ! No thought of 
looks, but only of utility. The showy, the highly 
ornate castle which the multimillionaire builds on 
his estate — would an artist ever want to put one 
of them in his picture? Beauty is likely to flee 
when we make a dead set at her. 

Emerson's exaggerations are sometimes so ex- 
cessive as to be simply amusing, as, when speaking 
of the feats of the imagination, he says, " My boots 
and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, 
meteors and constellations." The baseball, re- 
volving as it flies, may suggest the orbs, or your 
girdle suggest the equator, or the wiping of your 
face on a towel suggest the absorption of the rain 
by the soil; but does the blacking of your shoes 
suggest anything celestial ? Hinges and levers and 
fulcrums are significant, but one's old hat, or 
old boots, have not much poetic significance. An 
elm tree may suggest a cathedral, or a shell sug- 
101 



THE LAST HARVEST 

gest the rainbow, or the sparkling frost suggest 
diamonds, or the thread that holds the beads sym- 
bolize the law that strings the spheres, but a button 
is a button, a shoestring a shoestring, and a spade a 
spade, and nothing more. 

I cherish and revere the name of Emerson so 
profoundly, and owe him such a debt, that it seems, 
after all, a pity to point out the flaws in his pre- 
cious amber. 

Let us keep alive the Emersonian memories : 
that such a man has lived and wrought among us. 
Let us teach our children his brave and heroic 
words, and plant our lives upon as secure an ethi- 
cal foundation as he did. Let us make pilgrimages 
to Concord, and stand with uncovered heads be- 
neath the pine tree where his ashes rest. He left 
us an estate in the fair land of the Ideal. He be- 
queathed us treasures that thieves cannot break 
through and steal, nor time corrupt, nor rust nor 
moth destroy. 1 

1 At the onset of the author's last illness he attempted to re- 
arrange and improve this essay, but was even then unequal to 
it, and, after a little shifting and editing, gave it up. "Do 
what you can with it," he said; and when I asked him if he 
could not add a few words to close it, he sat up in bed, and 
wrote the closing sentences, which proved to be the last he 
ever penned. — C. B. 



102 



Ill 

ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 



After Emerson, the name of no New England 
man of letters keeps greener and fresher than that 
of Thoreau. A severe censor of his countrymen, 
and with few elements of popularity, yet the qual- 
ity of his thought, the sincerity of his life, and the 
nearness and perennial interest of his themes, as 
well as his rare powers of literary expression, win 
recruits from each generation of readers. He does 
not grow stale any more than Walden Pond itself 
grows stale. He is an obstinate fact there in New 
England life and literature, and at the end of his 
first centennial his fame is more alive than ever. 

Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, 
July, 1817, and passed most of his life of forty-five 
years in his native town, minding his own business, 
as he would say, which consisted, for the most part, 
in spending at least the half of each day in the 
open air, winter and summer, rain and shine, and 
in keeping tab upon all the doings of wild nature 
about him and recording his observations in his 
Journal. 

103 



THE LAST HARVEST 

The two race strains that met in Thoreau, the 
Scottish and the French, come out strongly in his 
life and character. To the French he owes his 
vivacity, his lucidity, his sense of style, and his 
passion for the wild ; for the French, with all their 
urbanity and love of art, turn to nature very eas- 
ily. To the Scot he is indebted more for his char- 
acter than for his intellect. From this source come 
his contrariness, his combativeness, his grudg- 
ing acquiescence, and his pronounced mysticism. 
Thence also comes his genius for solitude. The 
man who in his cabin in the woods has a good deal 
of company " especially the mornings when no- 
body calls," is French only in the felicity of his 
expression. But there is much in Thoreau that is 
neither Gallic nor Scottish, but pure Thoreau. 

The most point-blank and authoritative criti- 
cism within my knowledge that Thoreau has 
received at the hands of his countrymen came 
from the pen of Lowell about 1864, and was included 
in " My Study Windows." It has all the profes- 
sional smartness and scholarly qualities which usu- 
ally characterize Lowell's critical essays. Thoreau 
was vulnerable, both as an observer and as a liter- 
ary craftsman, and Lowell lets him off pretty 
easily — too easily — on both counts. 

The flaws he found in his nature lore were very 
inconsiderable : " Till he built his Walden shack 
he did not know that the hickory grew near Con- 
104 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

cord. Till he went to Maine he had never seen 
phosphorescent wood — a phenomenon early fa- 
miliar to most country boys. At forty he spoke 
of the seeding [i. e., flowering] 1 of the pine as a new 
discovery, though one should have thought that 
its gold-dust of blowing pollen might have earlier 
caught his eye." 

As regards his literary craftsmanship, Lowell 
charges him only with having revived the age of 
concetti while he fancied himself going back to a 
preclassical nature, basing the charge on such a 
far-fetched comparison as that in which Thoreau 
declares his preference for " the dry wit of decayed 
cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the 
moss-beds " over the wit of the Greek sages as it 
comes to us in the " Banquet " of Xenophon — a 
kind of perversity of comparison all too frequent 
with Thoreau. 

But though Lowell lets Thoreau off easily on 
these specific counts, he more than makes up by 
his sweeping criticism, on more general grounds, 
of his life and character. Here one feels that he 
overdoes the matter. 

It is not true, in the sense which Lowell implies, 
that Thoreau's whole life was a search for the doc- 
tor. It was such a search in no other sense than 
that we are all in search of the doctor when we take 

1 See "Walking" in Excursions. He was under thirty-three 
when he made these observations (June, 1850). 

105 



THE LAST HARVEST 

a walk, or flee to the mountains or to the seashore, 
or seek to bring our minds and spirits in contact 
with " Nature's primal sanities." His search for 
the doctor turns out to be an escape from the con- 
ditions that make a doctor necessary. His won- 
derful activity, those long walks in all weathers, 
in all seasons, by night as well as by day, drenched 
by rain and chilled by frost, suggest a reckless kind 
of health. A doctor might wisely have cautioned 
him against such exposures. Nor was Thoreau a 
valetudinarian in his physical, moral, or intel- 
lectual fiber. 

It is not true, as Lowell charges, that it was his 
indolence that stood in the way of his taking part 
in the industrial activities in which his friends and 
neighbors engaged, or that it was his lack of per- 
sistence and purpose that hindered him. It is not 
true that he was poor because he looked upon 
money as an unmixed evil. Thoreau's purpose 
was like adamant, and his industry in his own proper 
pursuits was tireless. He knew the true value 
of money, and he knew also that the best things 
in life are to be had without money and without 
price. When he had need of money, he earned 
it. He turned his hand to many things — land- 
surveying, lecturing, magazine-writing, growing 
white beans, doing odd jobs at carpentering, 
whitewashing, fence-building, plastering, and brick- 
laying. 

106 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

Lowell's criticism amounts almost to a diatribe. 
He was naturally antagonistic to the Thoreau type 
of mind. Coming from a man near his own age, 
and a neighbor, Thoreau's criticism of life was an 
affront to the smug respectability and scholarly 
attainments of the class to which Lowell belonged. 
Thoreau went his own way, with an air of defiance 
and contempt which, no doubt, his contemporaries 
were more inclined to resent than we are at our 
distance. Shall this man in his hut on the shores 
of Walden Pond assume to lay down the law and 
the gospel to his elders and betters, and pass un- 
rebuked, no matter on what intimate terms he 
claims to be with the gods of the woods and moun- 
tains ? This seems to be Lowell's spirit. 

" Thoreau's experiment," says Lowell, " actu- 
ally presupposed all that complicated civilization 
which it theoretically abjured. He squatted on 
another man's land ; he borrows an axe ; his boards, 
his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, 
his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state's 
evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin 
of that artificial civilization which rendered it 
possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau 
should exist at all." Very clever, but what of it? 
Of course Thoreau was a product of the civilization 
he decried. He was a product of his country and 
his times. He was born in Concord and early came 
under the influence of Emerson ; he was a graduate 
107 



THE LAST HARVEST 

of Harvard University and all his life availed him- 
self, more or less, of the accumulated benefits of state 
and social organizations. When he took a train to 
Boston, or dropped a letter in, or received one 
through, the post office, or read a book, or visited 
a library, or looked in a newspaper, he was a sharer 
in these benefits. He made no claims to living in- 
dependently of the rest of mankind. His only 
aim in his Walden experiment was to reduce life to 
its lowest terms, to drive it into a corner, as he said, 
and question and cross-question it, and see, if he 
could, what it really meant. And he probably 
came as near cornering it there in his hut on Walden 
Pond as any man ever did anywhere, certainly in a 
way more pleasing to contemplate than did the old 
hermits in the desert, or than did Diogenes in his 
tub, though Lowell says the tub of the old Greek 
had a sounder bottom. 

Lowell seemed to discredit Thoreau by attack- 
ing his philosophy and pointing out the contra- 
dictions and inconsistencies of a man who abjures 
the civilization of which he is the product, over- 
looking the fact that man's theories and specula- 
tions may be very wide of the truth as we view it, 
and yet his life be noble and inspiring. Now 
Thoreau did not give us a philosophy, but a life. 
He gave us fresh and beautiful literature, he gave 
us our first and probably only nature classic, he 
gave us an example of plain living and high think- 
108 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

ing that is always in season, and he took upon him- 
self that kind of noble poverty that carries the 
suggestion of wealth of soul. 

No matter how much Thoreau abjured our civ- 
ilization, he certainly made good use of the weap- 
ons it gave him. No matter |whose lands he 
squatted on, or whose saw he borrowed, or to whom 
or what he was indebted for the tools and utensils 
that made his life at Walden possible, — these 
things were the mere accidents of his environment, 
— he left a record of his life and thoughts there 
which is a precious heritage to his countrymen. 
The best in his books ranks with the best in the 
literature of his times. One could wish that he 
had shown more tolerance for the things other men 
live for, but this must not make us overlook the 
value of the things he himself lived for, though with 
some of his readers his intolerance doubtless has 
this effect. We cannot all take to the woods and 
swamps as Thoreau did. He had a genius for that 
kind of a life; the most of us must stick to our 
farms and desks and shops and professions. 

Thoreau retired to Walden for study and con- 
templation, and because, as he said, he had a little 
private business with himself. He found that by 
working about six weeks in the year he could meet 
all his living expenses, and then have all his winter 
and most of his summers free and clear for study. 
He found that to maintain one's self on this earth 
109 



THE LAST HARVEST 

is not a hardship, but a pastime, if one will live 
simply and wisely. He said, "It is not necessary 
that a man should earn his living by the sweat of 
his brow unless he sweats easier than I do." Was 
not his experiment worth while ? 

"Walden" is a wonderful and delightful piece of 
brag, but it is much more than that. It is litera- 
ture ; it is a Gospel of the Wild. It made a small 
Massachusetts pond famous, and the Mecca of 
many devout pilgrims. 

Lowell says that Thoreau had no humor, but 
there are many pages in " Walden " that are 
steeped in a quiet but most delicious humor. His 
humor brings that inward smile which is the badge 
of art's felicity. His " Bean-Field " is full of it. 
I venture to say that never before had a hermit 
so much fun with a field of white beans. 

Both by training and by temperament Lowell was 
disqualified from entering into Thoreau's character 
and aims. Lowell's passion for books and aca- 
demic accomplishments was as strong as was Tho- 
reau's passion for the wild and for the religion of 
Nature. When Lowell went to Nature for a theme, 
as in his " Good Word for Winter," his " My Gar- 
den Acquaintance," and the " Moosehead Jour- 
nal," his use of it was mainly to unlock the treas- 
ures of his literary and scholarly attainments ; he 
bedecked and bejeweled Nature with gems from 
all the literatures of the world. In the " Journal " 
110 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

we get more of the flavor of libraries than of the 
Maine woods and waters. No reader of Lowell 
can doubt that he was a nature-lover, nor can he 
doubt that he loved books and libraries more. In 
all his'nature writings the poverty of the substance 
and the wealth of the treatment are striking. The 
final truth about Lowell's contributions is that 
his mind was essentially a prose mind, even when 
he writes poetry. Emerson said justly that his 
tone was always that of prose. What is his " Ca- 
thedral " but versified prose ? Like so many cul- 
tivated men, he showed a talent for poetry, but 
not genius ; as, on the other hand, one may say of 
Emerson that he showed more genius for poetry 
than talent, his inspiration surpassed his tech- 
nical skill. 

One is not surprised when he finds that John 
Brown was one of Thoreau's heroes ; he was a sort 
of John Brown himself in another sphere ; but one 
is surprised when one finds him so heartily approv- 
ing of Walt Whitman and traveling to Brooklyn 
to look upon him and hear his voice. He recog- 
nized at once the tremendous significance of Whit- 
man and the power of his poetry. He called him 
the greatest democrat which the world had yet 
seen. With all his asceticism and his idealism, 
he was not troubled at all with those things in 
Whitman that are a stumbling-block to so many 
persons. Evidently his long intercourse with 
111 



THE LAST HARVEST 

Nature had prepared him for the primitive and 
elemental character of Whitman's work. No 
doubt also his familiarity with the great poems 
and sacred books of the East helped him. At any 
rate, in this respect, his endorsement of Whitman 
adds greatly to our conception of the mental and 
spiritual stature of Thoreau. 

I can hold my criticism in the back of my head 
while I say with my forehead that all our other 
nature writers seem tame and insipid beside Tho- 
reau. He was so much more than a mere student 
and observer of nature; and it is this surplusage 
which gives the extra weight and value to his na- 
ture writing. He was a critic of life, he was a 
literary force that made for plain living and high 
thinking. His nature lore was an aside; he gath- 
ered it as the meditative saunterer gathers a 
leaf, or a flower, or a shell on the beach, while he 
ponders on higher things. He had other business 
with the gods of the woods than taking an inven- 
tory of their wares. He was a dreamer, an idealist, 
a fervid ethical teacher, seeking inspiration in the 
fields and woods. The hound, the turtle-dove, 
and the bay horse which he said he had lost, and 
for whose trail he was constantly seeking, typi- 
fied his interest in wild nature. The natural his- 
tory in his books is quite secondary. The natural 
or supernatural history of his own thought absorbed 
112 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

him more than the exact facts about the wild life 
around him. He brings us a gospel more than 
he brings us a history. His science is only the 
handmaid of his ethics; his wood-lore is the foil 
of his moral and intellectual teachings. His ob- 
servations are frequently at fault, or wholly wide 
of the mark ; but the flower or specimen that he 
brings you always " comes laden with a thought." 
There is a tang and a pungency to nearly every- 
thing he published; the personal quality which 
flavors it is like the formic acid which the bee 
infuses into the nectar he gets from the flower, and 
which makes it honey. 

I feel that some such statement about Thoreau 
should precede or go along with any criticism of 
him as a writer or as an observer. He was, first 
and last, a moral force speaking in the terms of the 
literary naturalist. 

Thoreau's prayer in one of his poems — that 
he might greatly disappoint his friends — seems 
to have been answered. While his acquaintances 
went into trade or the professions, he cast about 
to see what he could do to earn his living and still 
be true to the call of his genius. In his Journal 
of 1851 he says : " While formerly I was looking 
about to see what I could do for a living, some sad 
experiences in conforming to the wishes of friends 
being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I 
thought often and seriously of picking huckleber- 
113 



THE LAST HARVEST 

ries ; that surely I could do, and its small profits 
might suffice, so little capital is required, so little 
distraction from my wonted thoughts." He could 
range the hills in summer and still look after the 
flocks of King Admetus. He also dreamed that 
he might gather the wild herbs and carry ever- 
greens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of 
the woods. But he soon learned that trade cursed 
everything, and that " though you trade in mes- 
sages from heaven, the whole curse of trade at- 
taches to the business." The nearest his con- 
science would allow him to approach any kind of 
trade was to offer himself to his townsmen as a 
land-surveyor. This would take him to the places 
where he liked to be; he could still walk in the 
fields and woods and swamps and earn his living 
thereby. The chain and compass became him 
well, quite as well as his bean-field at Walden, and 
the little money they brought him was not en- 
tirely sordid. 

In one of his happy moods in " Walden" he 
sets down in a half-facetious, half-mystical, but 
wholly delightful way, his various avocations, 
such as his self-appointment as inspector of snow- 
storms and rain-storms, and surveyor of forest 
paths and all across-lot routes, and herdsman of 
the wild stock of the town. He is never more en- 
joyable than in such passages. His account of 
going into business at Walden Pond is in the same 
114 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

happy vein. As his fellow citizens were slow in 
offering him any opening in which he could earn 
a living, he turned to the woods, where he was bet- 
ter known, and determined to go into business at 
once without waiting to acquire the usual capital. 
He expected to open trade with the Celestial 
Empire, and Walden was just the place to start 
the venture. He thought his strict business 
habits acquired through years of keeping tab on 
wild Nature's doings, his winter days spent out- 
side the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, 
and his early spring mornings before his neighbors 
were astir to hear the croak of the first frog, all 
the training necessary to ensure success in business 
with the Celestial Empire. He admits, it is true, 
that he never assisted the sun materially in his 
rising, but doubted not that it was of the last im- 
portance only to be present at it. All such fool- 
ing as this is truly delightful. When he goes about 
his sylvan business with his tongue in his cheek 
and a quizzical, good-humored look upon his face 
in this way, and advertises the hound, the bay 
horse, and the turtle-dove he lost so long ago, 
he is the true Thoreau, and we take him to our 
hearts. 

One also enjoys the way in which he magnifies 
his petty occupations. His brag over his bean- 
field is delightful. He makes one want to hoe 
beans with him: 

115 



THE LAST HARVEST 

When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music 
echoed to the woods and the sky and was an accompani- 
ment to my labor which yielded an instant and im- 
measurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, 
nor I that hoed beans ; and I remembered with as much 
pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances 
who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The 
nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons — 
for I sometimes made a day of it — like a mote in the 
eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with 
a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn 
at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope 
remained ; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs 
on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the top of hills, 
where few have found them ; graceful and slender like 
ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised 
by the wind to float in the heavens ; such kindredship 
is in nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the wave 
which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air- 
inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged 
pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of 
hen-hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring 
and descending, approaching and leaving one another, 
as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. 
Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from 
this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing 
sound and carrier haste ; or from under a rotten stump 
my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish 
salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our con- 
temporary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these 
sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the 
row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which 
the country offers. 

All this is in his best style. Who, after reading 
it, does not long for a bean-field ? In planting it, 
too what music attends him ! 
116 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, 
sings the brown thrasher — or red mavis, as some love 
to call him — all the morning, glad of your society, 
that would find out another farmer's field if yours 
were not here. While you are planting the seed he 
cries, — "Drop it, drop it, — cover it up, cover it 
up, — pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But this was 
not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies 
as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his 
amateur Paganini performances on one string or on 
twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer 
it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of 
top dressing in which I had entire faith. 

What lessons he got in botany in the hoeing ! 

Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one 
makes with various kinds of weeds, — it will bear some 
iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration 
in the labor, — disturbing their delicate organizations 
so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions 
with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and 
sedulously cultivating another. That's Roman worm- 
wood, — that's pigweed, — that's sorrel, — that's 
pipergrass, — have at him, chop him up, turn his roots 
upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the 
shade, if you do he '11 turn himself t' other side up and 
be as green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with 
cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and 
rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me 
come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the 
ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy 
dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered 
a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before 
my weapon and rolled in the dust. 

I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, 
when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the 
wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who 

117 



THE LAST HARVEST 

is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, 
and fringed it with pine woods ; who tells me stories of 
old time and of new eternity ; and between us we man- 
age to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and 
pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider, 
— a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, 
who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or 
Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none 
can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too, 
dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, 
in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, 
gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she 
has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory 
runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me 
the original of every fable, and on what fact every one 
is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was 
young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in 
all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her 
children yet. 

Thoreau taxed himself to find words and images 
strong enough to express his aversion to the lives 
of the men who were " engaged " in the various in- 
dustrial fields about him. Everywhere in shops 
and offices and fields it appeared to him that his 
neighbors were doing penance in a thousand re- 
markable ways: 

What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to 
four fires and looking in the face of the sun ; or hang- 
ing suspended, with their heads downward, over flames ; 
or looking at the heavens over their shoulders " until it 
becomes impossible for them to resume their natural 
position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but 
liquids can pass into the stomach" ; or dwelling, chained 
for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their 
bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; 
118 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars, — even 
these forms of conscious penance are hardly more in- 
credible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily 
witness. ... I see young men, my townsmen, whose 
misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, 
cattle, and farming tools ; for these are more easily ac- 
quired than got rid of. 

Surely this disciple of the Gospel of the Wild must 
have disappointed his friends. It was this auda- 
cious gift which Thoreau had for making worldly 
possessions seem ignoble, that gives the tang to 
many pages of his writings. 

Thoreau became a great traveler — in Concord, 
as he says — and made Walden Pond famous in 
our literature by spending two or more years in 
the woods upon its shore, and writing an account 
of his sojourn there which has become a nature 
classic. He was a poet-naturalist, as his friend 
Channing aptly called him, of untiring industry, 
and the country in a radius of seven or eight miles 
about Concord was threaded by him in all seasons 
as probably no other section of New England was 
ever threaded and scrutinized by any one man. 
Walking in the fields and woods, and recording 
what he saw and heard and thought in his Jour- 
nal, became the business of his life. He went over 
the same ground endlessly, but always brought 
back new facts, or new impressions, because he was 
so sensitive to all the changing features of the day 
and the season in the landscape about him. 
119 



THE LAST HARVEST 

Once he extended his walking as far as Quebec, 
Canada, and once he took in the whole of Cape 
Cod; three or four times he made excursions to 
the Maine woods, the result of which gave the 
name to one of his most characteristic volumes; 
but as habitually as the coming of the day was he 
a walker about Concord, in all seasons, primarily 
for companionship with untamed Nature, and 
secondarily as a gleaner in the fields of natural 
history. 

II 

Thoreau was not a great philosopher, he was not 
a great naturalist, he was not a great poet, but as 
a nature-writer and an original character he is 
unique in our literature. His philosophy begins 
and ends with himself, or is entirely subjective, 
and is frequently fantastic, and nearly always il- 
logical. His poetry is of the oracular kind, and 
is only now and then worth attention. There are 
crudities in his writings that make the conscien- 
tious literary craftsman shudder; there are mis- 
takes of observation that make the serious natural- 
ist wonder; and there is often an expression of 
contempt for his fellow countrymen, and the rest 
of mankind, and their aims in life, that makes the 
judicious grieve. But at his best there is a gay 
symbolism, a felicity of description, and a freshness 
of observation that delight all readers. 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

As a person he gave himself to others reluc- 
tantly ; he was, in truth, a recluse. He stood for 
character more than for intellect, and for intuition 
more than for reason. He was often contrary and 
inconsistent. There was more crust than crumb 
in the loaf he gave us. 

He went about the business of living with his 
head in the clouds, or with an absolute devotion 
to the ideal that is certainly rare in our literary 
history. He declared that he aimed to crow like 
chanticleer in the morning, if only to wake his 
neighbors up. Much of his writings have this 
chanticleerian character; they are a call to wake 
up, to rub the film from one's eyes, and see the 
real values of life. To this end he prods with par- 
adoxes, he belabors with hyperboles, he teases with 
irony, he startles with the unexpected. He finds 
poverty more attractive than riches, solitude more 
welcome than society, a sphagnum swamp more to 
be desired than a flowered field. 

Thoreau is suggestive of those antibodies which 
modern science makes so much of. He tends to 
fortify us against the dry rot of business, the se- 
ductions of social pleasures, the pride of wealth 
and position. He is antitoxic; he is a literary 
germicide of peculiar power. He is too religious 
to go to church, too patriotic to pay his taxes, too 
fervent a humanist to interest himself in the social 
welfare of his neighborhood. 
121 



THE LAST HARVEST 

Thoreau called himself a mystic, and a tran- 
scendentalism and a natural philosopher to boot. 
But the least of these was the natural philosopher. 
He did not have the philosophic mind, nor the 
scientific mind ; he did not inquire into the reason 
of things, nor the meaning of things ; in fact, had 
no disinterested interest in the universe apart 
from himself. He was too personal and illogical 
for a philosopher. The scientific interpretation of 
things did not interest him at all. He was inter- 
ested in things only so far as they related to Henry 
Thoreau. He interpreted Nature entirely in the 
light of his own idiosyncrasies. 

Science goes its own way in spite of our likes 
and dislikes, but Thoreau's likes and dislikes de- 
termined everything for him. He was stoical, 
but not philosophical. His intellect had no free 
play outside his individual predilection. Truth 
as philosophers use the term, was not his quest 
but truth made in Concord. 

Thoreau writes that when he was once asked by 
the Association for the Advancement of Science 
what branch of science he was especially interested 
in, he did not reply because he did not want to 
make himself the laughing-stock of the scientific 
community, which did not believe in a science 
which deals with the higher law — his higher law, 
which bears the stamp of Henry Thoreau. 

He was an individualist of the most pronounced 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

type. The penalty of this type of mind is nar- 
rowness; the advantage is the personal flavor 
imparted to the written page. Thoreau's books 
contain plenty of the pepper and salt of character 
and contrariness; even their savor of whim and 
prejudice adds to their literary tang. When his 
individualism becomes aggressive egotism, as often 
happens, it is irritating; but when it gives only 
that pungent and personal flavor which pervades 
much of " Walden," it is very welcome. 

Thoreau's critics justly aver that he severely 
arraigns his countrymen because they are not all 
Thoreaus — that they do not desert their farms 
and desks and shops and take to the woods. What 
unmeasured contempt he pours out upon the lives 
and ambitions of most of them ! Need a nature- 
lover, it is urged, necessarily be a man-hater? Is 
not man a part of nature ? — averaging up quite 
as good as the total scheme of things out of which 
he came? Cannot his vices and shortcomings be 
matched by a thousand cruel and abortive things 
in the fields and the woods ? The fountain cannot 
rise above its source, and man is as good as is the 
nature out of which he came, and of which he is a 
part. Most of Thoreau's harsh judgments upon 
his neighbors and countrymen are only his extreme 
individualism gone to seed. 

An extremist he always was. Extreme views 
commended themselves to him because they were 
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extreme. His aim in writing was usually " to 
make an extreme statement." He left the middle 
ground to the school committees and trustees. He 
had in him the stuff of which martyrs and heroes 
are made. In John Brown he recognized a kin- 
dred soul. But his literary bent led him to take 
his own revolutionary impulses out in words. The 
closest he came to imitation of the hero of Harper's 
Ferry and to defying the Government was on one 
occasion when he refused to pay his poll-tax and 
thus got himself locked in jail overnight. It all 
seems a petty and ignoble ending of his fierce de- 
nunciation of politics and government, but it no 
doubt helped to satisfy his imagination, which so 
tyrannized over him throughout life. He could 
endure offenses against his heart and conscience 
and reason easier than against his imagination. 

He presents that curious phenomenon of a man 
who is an extreme product of culture and civiliza- 
tion, and yet who so hungers and thirsts for the 
wild and the primitive that he is unfair to the 
forces and conditions out of which he came, and by 
which he is at all times nourished and upheld. He 
made his excursions into the Maine wilderness 
and lived in his hut by Walden Pond as a scholar 
and philosopher, and not at all in the spirit of the 
lumbermen and sportsmen whose wildness he so 
much admired. It was from his vantage-ground 
of culture and of Concord transcendentalism that 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

he appraised all these types. It was from a com- 
munity built up and sustained by the common 
industries and the love of gain that he decried all 
these things. It was from a town and a civiliza- 
tion that owed much to the pine tree that he 
launched his diatribe against the lumbermen in 
the Maine woods : " The pine is no more lumber 
than man is; and to be made into boards and 
houses no more its true and highest use than the 
truest use of man is to be cut down and made into 
manure." Not a happy comparison, but no matter. 
If the pine tree had not been cut down and made 
into lumber, it is quite certain that Thoreau would 
never have got to the Maine woods to utter this 
protest, just as it is equally certain that had he 
not been a member of a thrifty and industrious 
community, and kept his hold upon it, he could 
not have made his Walden experiment of toying 
and coquetting with the wild and the non-indus- 
trial. His occupations as land-surveyor, lyceum 
lecturer, and magazine writer attest how much he 
owed to the civilization he was so fond of decrying. 
This is Thoreau's weakness — the half-truths in 
which he plumes himself, as if they were the whole 
law and gospel. His Walden bean-field was only 
a pretty piece of play-acting; he cared more for 
the ringing of his hoe upon the stones than for the 
beans. Had his living really depended upon the 
product, the sound would not have pleased him 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

so, and the botany of the weeds he hoed under 
would not have so interested him. 

Thoreau's half-truths titillate and amuse the 
mind. We do not nod over his page. We enjoy 
his art while experiencing an undercurrent of pro- 
test against his unfairness. We could have wished 
him to have shown himself in his writings as 
somewhat sweeter and more tolerant toward the rest 
of the world, broader in outlook, and more just and 
charitable in disposition — more like his great proto- 
type, Emerson, who could do full justice to the wild 
and the spontaneous without doing an injustice to 
their opposites; who could see the beauty of the 
pine tree, yet sing the praises of the pine-tree State 
House; who could arraign the Government, yet 
pay his taxes; who could cherish Thoreau, and 
yet see all his limitations. Emerson affirmed more 
than he denied, and his charity was as broad as his 
judgment. He set Thoreau a good example in 
bragging, but he bragged to a better purpose. He 
exalted the present moment, the universal fact, 
the omnipotence of the moral law, the sacredness 
of private judgment ; he pitted the man of to-day 
against all the saints and heroes of history; and, 
although he decried traveling, he was yet consider- 
able of a traveler, and never tried to persuade him- 
self that Concord was an epitome of the world. 
Emerson comes much nearer being a national 
figure than does Thoreau, and yet Thoreau, by 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

reason of his very narrowness and perversity, and 
by his intense local character, united to the pene- 
trating character of his genius, has made an endur- 
ing impression upon our literature. 



Ill 

Thoreau's life was a search for the wild. He 
was the great disciple of the Gospel of Walking. 
He elevated walking into a religious exercise. One 
of his most significant and entertaining chapters 
is on " Walking." No other writer that I recall 
has set forth the Gospel of Walking so eloquently 
and so stimulatingly. Thoreau's religion and his 
philosophy are all in this chapter. It is his most 
mature, his most complete and comprehensive 
statement. He says : 

I have met with but one or two persons in the course 
of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, 
of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak, for 
sauntering, which word is beautifully derived " from idle 
people who roved about the country, in the Middle 
Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going 
a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children 
exclaimed, " There goes a Sainte-Terrer" — a Saun- 
terer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy 
Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere 
idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are 
saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. . . . For 
every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter 
the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy 
Land from the hands of the Infidels. 

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Thoreau was the first man in this country, or in 
any other, so far as I know, who made a religion 
of walking — the first to announce a Gospel of the 
Wild. That he went forth into wild nature in 
much the same spirit that the old hermits went into 
the desert, and was as devout in his way as they 
were in theirs, is revealed by numerous passages 
in his Journal. He would make his life a sac- 
rament; he discarded the old religious terms and 
ideas, and struck out new ones of his own : 

What more glorious condition of being can we imagine 
than from impure to become pure ? May I not forget 
that I am impure and vicious ! May I not cease to 
love purity ! May I go to my slumbers as expecting to 
arise to a new and more perfect day ! May I so live 
and refine my life as fitting myself for a society ever 
higher than I actually enjoy ! 

To watch for and describe all the divine features 
which I detect in nature ! My profession is to be al- 
ways on the alert to find God in nature, to know his 
lurking-place, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, 
in nature. 

Ah ! I would walk, I would sit, and sleep, with na- 
tural piety. What if I could pray aloud or to myself 
as I went along the brooksides a cheerful prayer like 
the birds? For joy I could embrace the earth. I shall 
delight to be buried in it. 

I do not deserve anything. I am unworthy the 
least regard, and yet I am made to rejoice. I am im- 
pure and worthless, and yet the world is gilded for my 
delight and holidays are prepared for me, and my path 
is strewn with flowers. But I cannot thank the Giver ; 
I cannot even whisper my thanks to the human friends 
I have. 

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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

In the essay on " Walking," Thoreau says that 
the art of walking " comes only by the grace 
of God. It requires a direct dispensation from 
Heaven to become a walker. You must be born 
into the family of the Walkers." " I think that 
I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I 
spend four hours a day at least, — it is commonly 
more than that, — sauntering through the woods 
and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from 
all worldly engagements." 

Thoreau made good his boast. He was a new 
kind of walker, a Holy-Lander. His walks yielded 
him mainly spiritual and ideal results. The four- 
teen published volumes of his Journal are mainly 
a record of his mental reactions to the passing sea- 
sons and to the landscape he sauntered through. 
There is a modicum of natural history, but mostly 
he reaps the intangible harvest of the poet, the 
saunterer, the mystic, the super-sportsman. 

With his usual love of paradox Thoreau says 
that the fastest way to travel is to go afoot, because, 
one may add, the walker is constantly arriving at 
his destination; all places are alike to him, his 
harvest grows all along the road and beside 
every path, in every field and wood and on every 
hilltop. 

All of Thoreau's books belong to the literature 
of Walking, and are as true in spirit in Paris or 
London as in Concord. His natural history, for 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

which he had a passion, is the natural history of the 
walker, not always accurate, as I have pointed out, 
but always graphic and interesting. 

Wordsworth was about the first poet- walker — 
a man of letters who made a business of walking, 
and whose study was really the open air. But he 
was not a Holy-Lander in the Thoreau sense. He 
did not walk to get away from people as Thoreau 
did, but to see a greater variety of them, and to 
gather suggestions for his poems. Not so much 
the wild as the human and the morally signifi- 
cant were the objects of Wordsworth's quest. He 
haunted waterfalls and fells and rocky heights and 
lonely tarns, but he was not averse to footpaths 
and highways, and the rustic, half-domesticated 
nature of rural England. He was a nature-lover; 
he even calls himself a nature- worshiper ; and he 
appears to have walked as many, or more, hours 
each day, in all seasons, as did Thoreau; but he 
was hunting for no lost paradise of the wild ; nor 
waging a war against the arts and customs of 
civilization. Man and life were at the bottom of 
his interest in Nature. 

Wordsworth never knew the wild as we know it 
in this country — the pitilessly savage and re- 
bellious ; and, on the other hand, he never knew 
the wonderfully delicate and furtive and elusive 
nature that we know; but he knew the sylvan, 
the pastoral, the rustic-human, as we cannot know 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

them. British birds have nothing plaintive in 
their songs ; and British woods and fells but little 
that is disorderly and cruel in their expression, or 
violent in their contrasts. 

Wordsworth gathered his finest poetic harvest 
from common nature and common humanity about 
him — the wayside birds and flowers and water- 
falls, and the wayside people. Though he called 
himself a worshiper of Nature, it was Nature in 
her half -human moods that he adored — Nature 
that knows no extremes, and that has long been 
under the influence of man — a soft, humid, fertile, 
docile Nature, that suggests a domesticity as old 
and as permanent as that of cattle and sheep. His 
poetry reflects these features, reflects the high 
moral and historic significance of the European 
landscape, while the poetry of Emerson, and of 
Thoreau, is born of the wildness and elusiveness 
of our more capricious and unkempt Nature. 

The walker has no axe to grind; he sniffs the 
air for new adventure ; he loiters in old scenes, he 
gleans in old fields. He only seeks intimacy with 
Nature to surprise her preoccupied with her own 
affairs. He seeks her in the woods, the swamps, 
on the hills, along the streams, by night and by day, 
in season and out of season. He skims the fields 
and hillsides as the swallow skims the air, and what 
he gets is intangible to most persons. He sees 
much with his eyes, but he sees more with his heart 
131 



THE LAST HARVEST 

and imagination. He bathes in Nature as in a 
sea. He is alert for the beauty that waves in the 
trees, that ripples in the grass and grain, that flows 
in the streams, that drifts in the clouds, that 
sparkles in the dew and rain. The hammer of the 
geologist, the notebook of the naturalist, the box 
of the herbalist, the net of the entomologist, are 
not for him. He drives no sharp bargains with 
Nature, he reads no sermons in stones, no books in 
running brooks, but he does see good in everything. 
The book he reads he reads through all his senses 
— through his eyes, his ears, his nose, and also 
through his feet and hands — and its pages are 
open everywhere; the rocks speak of more than 
geology to him, the birds of more than ornithology, 
the flowers of more than botany, the stars of more 
than astronomy, the wild creatures of more than 
zoology. 

The average walker is out for exercise and the 
exhilarations of the road, he reaps health and 
strength; but Thoreau evidently impaired his 
health by his needless exposure and inadequate 
food. He was a Holy-Lander who falls and dies 
in the Holy Land. He ridiculed walking for exer- 
cise — taking a walk as the sick take medicine ; 
the walk itself was to be the " enterprise and ad- 
venture of the day." And " you must walk like 
a camel, which is said to be the only beast which 
ruminates while walking." 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

IV 
Thoreau's friends and neighbors seem to have 
persuaded themselves that his natural-history lore 
was infallible, and, moreover, that he possessed 
some mysterious power over the wild creatures 
about him that other men did not possess. I recall 
how Emerson fairly bristled up when on one occa- 
sion while in conversation with him I told him I 
thought Thoreau in his trips to the Maine woods 
had confounded the hermit thrush with the wood 
thrush, as the latter was rarely or never found in 
Maine. As for Thoreau's influence over the wild 
creatures, Emerson voiced this superstition when 
he said, " Snakes coiled round his leg, the fishes 
swam into his hand, and he took them from the 
water ; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by 
the tail, and took the foxes under his protection 
from the hunters." Of course Thoreau could do 
nothing with the wild creatures that you or I could 
not do under the same conditions. A snake will 
coil around any man's leg if he steps on its tail, 
but it will not be an embrace of affection; and a 
fish will swim into his hands under the same con- 
ditions that it will into Thoreau's. As for pulling 
a woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, the only 
trouble is to get hold of the tail. The 'chuck is 
pretty careful to keep his tail behind him, but many 
a farm boy, aided by his dog, has pulled one out of 
the stone wall by the tail, much against the 'chuck's 

133 



THE LAST HARVEST 

will. If Thoreau's friends were to claim that he 
could carry Mephitis mephitica by the tail with 
impunity, I can say I have done the same thing, 
and had my photograph taken in the act. The 
skunk is no respecter of persons, and here again 
the trouble is to get hold of the tail at the right 
moment — and, I may add, to let go of it at the 
right moment. 

Thoreau's influence over the wild creatures is 
what every man possesses who is alike gentle in 
his approach to them. Bradford Torrey succeeded, 
after a few experiments, in so dispelling the fears 
of an incubating red-eyed vireo that she would 
take insect food from his hand, and I have known 
several persons to become so familiar with the 
chickadees that they would feed from the hand, 
and in some instances even take food from be- 
tween the lips. If you have a chipmunk for a 
neighbor, you may soon become on such intimate 
terms with him that he will search your pockets 
for nuts and sit on your knee and shoulder and eat 
them. But why keep alive and circulate as truth 
these animal legends of the prescientific ages ? 

Thoreau was not a born naturalist, but a born 
supernaturalist. He was too intent upon the bird 
behind the bird always to take careful note of the 
bird itself. He notes the birds, but not too closely. 
He was at times a little too careless in this respect 
to be a safe guide to the bird-student. Even the 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

saunterer to the Holy Land ought to know the 
indigo bunting from the black-throated blue war- 
bler, with its languid, midsummery, " Zee, zee, 
zee-eu." 

Many of his most interesting natural-history 
notes Thoreau got from his farmer friends — Mel- 
vin, Minott, Miles, Hubbard, Wheeler. Their eyes 
were more single to the life around them than 
were his ; none of them had lost a hound, a turtle- 
dove, and a bay horse, whose trail they were daily 
in quest of. 

A haunter of swamps and river marshes all his 
life, he had never yet observed how the night bit- 
tern made its booming or pumping sound, but ac- 
cepted the explanation of one of his neighbors that 
it was produced by the bird thrusting its bill in 
water, sucking up as much as it could hold, and 
then pumping it out again with four or five heaves 
of the neck, throwing the water two or three feet 
— in fact, turning itself into a veritable pump ! I 
have stood within a few yards of the bird when it 
made the sound, and seen the convulsive movement 
of the neck and body, and the lifting of the head 
as the sound escaped. The bird seems literally 
to vomit up its notes, but it does not likewise emit 
water. 

Every farmer and fox-hunter would smile if he 
read Thoreau' s statement, made in his paper on 
the natural history of Massachusetts, that " when 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

the snow lies light and but five or six inches deep, 
you may give chase and come up with the fox on 
foot," Evidently Thoreau had never tried it. 
With a foot and a half, or two feet of snow on the 
ground, and traveling on snowshoes, you might 
force a fox to take to his hole, but you would not 
come up to him. In four or five feet of soft snow 
hunters come up with the deer, and ride on their 
backs for amusement, but I doubt if a red fox ever 
ventures out in such a depth of snow. In one of 
his May walks in 1860, Thoreau sees the trail of 
the musquash in the mud along the river-bottoms, 
and he is taken by the fancy that, as our roads and 
city streets often follow the early tracks of the cow, 
so " rivers in another period follow the trail of the 
musquash." As if the river was not there before 
the musquash was ! 

Again, his mysterious " night warbler," to which 
he so often alludes, was one of our common every- 
day birds which most school-children know, 
namely, the oven-bird, or wood-accentor, yet to 
Thoreau it was a sort of phantom bird upon which 
his imagination loved to dwell. Emerson told 
him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest 
life should have nothing more to show him. But 
how such a haunter of woods escaped identifying 
the bird is a puzzle. 

In his walks in the Maine woods Thoreau failed 
to discriminate the song of the hermit thrush from 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

that of the wood thrush. The melody, no doubt, 
went to his heart, and that was enough. Though 
he sauntered through orchards and rested under 
apple trees, he never observed that the rings of small 
holes in the bark were usually made by the yellow- 
bellied woodpecker, instead of by Downy, and 
that the bird was not searching for grubs or in- 
sects, but was feeding upon the milky cambium 
layer of the inner bark. 

But Thoreau's little slips of the kind I have 
called attention to count as nothing against the 
rich harvest of natural-history notes with which 
his work abounds. He could describe bird-songs 
and animal behavior and give these things their 
right emphasis in the life of the landscape as no 
other New England writer has done. His account 
of the battle of the ants in Walden atones an hun- 
dred-fold for the lapses I have mentioned. 

One wonders just what Thoreau means when he 
says in " Walden," in telling of his visit to " Baker 
Farm " : " Once it chanced that I stood in the 
very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled 
the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the 
grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I 
looked through colored crystal." Is it possible, 
then, to reach the end of the rainbow ? Why did 
he not dig for the pot of gold that is buried there ? 
How he could be aware that he was standing at 
the foot of one leg of the glowing arch is to me a 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

mystery. When I see a rainbow, it is always im- 
mediately in front of me. I am standing exactly 
between the highest point of the arch and the sun, 
and the laws of optics ordain that it can be seen in 
no other way. You can never see a rainbow at an 
angle. It always faces you squarely. Hence no two 
persons see exactly the same bow, because no two 
persons can occupy exactly the same place at the 
same time. The bow you see is directed to you alone. 
Move to the right or the left, and it moves as 
fast as you do. You cannot flank it or reach its 
end. It is about the most subtle and significant 
phenomenon that everyday Nature presents to us. 
Unapproachable as a spirit, like a visitant from an- 
other world, yet the creation of the familiar sun 
and rain ! 

How Thoreau found himself standing in the 
bow's abutment will always remain a puzzle to me. 
Observers standing on high mountains with the 
sun low in the west have seen the bow as a com- 
plete circle. This one can understand. 

We can point many a moral and adorn many a 
tale with Thoreau's shortcomings and failures in 
his treatment of nature themes. Channing quotes 
him as saying that sometimes " you must see with 
the inside of your eye." I think that Thoreau saw, 
or tried to see, with the inside of his eye too often. 
He does not always see correctly, and many times 
he sees more of Thoreau than he does of the nature 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

he assumes to be looking at. Truly it is " needless 
to travel for wonders," but the wonderful is not 
one with the fantastic or the far-fetched. Forcible 
expression, as I have said, was his ruling passion 
as a writer. Only when he is free from its thrall, 
which in his best moments he surely is, does he 
write well. When he can forget Thoreau and re- 
member only nature, we get those delightful de- 
scriptions and reflections in " Walden." When 
he goes to the Maine woods or to Cape Cod or to 
Canada, he leaves all his fantastic rhetoric behind 
him and gives us sane and refreshing books. In 
his walks with Channing one suspects he often let 
himself go to all lengths, did his best to turn the 
world inside out, as he did at times in his Journals, 
for his own edification and that of his wondering 
disciple. 

To see analogies and resemblances everywhere is 
the gift of genius, but to see a resemblance to vol- 
canoes in the hubs or gnarls on birch or beech trees, 
or cathedral windows in the dead leaves of the an- 
dromeda in January, or a suggestion of Teneriffe 
in a stone-heap, does not indicate genius. To see 
the great in the little, or the whole of Nature in 
any of her parts, is the poet's gift, but to ask, after 
seeing the andropogon grass, " Are there no purple 
reflections from the culms of thought in my mind ? " 
— a remark which Channing quotes as very sig- 
nificant — is not to be poetical. Thoreau is full 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

of these impossible and fantastic comparisons, 
thinking only of striking expressions and not at all 
about the truth. " The flowing of the sap under the 
dull rind of the trees " is suggestive, but what sug- 
gestion is there in the remark, " May I ever be in 
as good spirits as a willow " ? The mood of the 
scrub oak was more habitual with him. 

Thoreau was in no sense an interpreter of nature ; 
he did not draw out its meanings or seize upon and 
develop its more significant phases. Seldom does 
he relate what he sees or thinks to the universal 
human heart and mind. He has rare power of 
description, but is very limited in his power to 
translate the facts and movements of nature into 
human emotion. His passage on the northern 
lights, which Channing quotes from the Journals, 
is a good sample of his failure in this respect : 

Now the fire in the north increases wonderfully, not 
shooting up so much as creeping along, like a fire on the 
mountains of the north seen afar in the night. The 
Hyperborean gods are burning brush, and it spread, 
and all the hoes in heaven could n't stop it. It spread 
from west to east over the crescent hill. Like a vast 
fiery worm it lay across the northern sky, broken into 
many pieces ; and each piece, with rainbow colors 
skirting it, strove to advance itself toward the east, 
worm-like, on its own annular muscles. It has spread 
into their choicest wood-lots. Now it shoots up like a 
single solitary watch-fire or burning bush, or where it 
ran up a pine tree like powder, and still it continues to 
gleam here and there like a fat stump in the burning, 
and is reflected in the water. And now I see the gods 

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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

by great exertions have got it under, and the stars have 
come out without fear, in peace. 

I get no impression of the mysterious almost 
supernatural character of the aurora from such a 
description in terms of a burning wood-lot or a 
hay-stack ; it is no more like a conflagration than 
an apparition is like solid flesh and blood. Its 
wonderful, I almost said its spiritual, beauty, its 
sudden vanishings and returnings, its spectral, 
evanescent character — why, it startles and awes 
one as if it were the draperies around the throne of 
the Eternal. And then his mixed metaphor — 
the Hyperborean gods turned farmers and busy 
at burning brush, then a fiery worm, and then the 
burning wood-lots ! But this is Thoreau — in- 
spired with the heavenly elixir one moment, and 
drunk with the brew in his own cellar the next. 

V 

Thoreau's faults as a writer are as obvious as his 
merits. Emerson hit upon one of them when he 
said, " The trick of his rhetoric is soon learned ; it 
consists in substituting for the obvious word and 
thought, its diametrical antagonist." He praises 
wild mountains and winter forests for their domes- 
tic air, snow and ice for their warmth, and so on. 
(Yet Emerson in one of his poems makes frost burn 
and fire freeze.) One frequently comes upon such 
sentences as these : " If I were sadder, I should 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

be happier " ; " The longer I have forgotten you, 
the more I remember you." It may give a mo- 
ment's pleasure when a writer takes two opposites 
and rubs their ears together in that way, but one 
may easily get too much of it. Words really mean 
nothing when used in such a manner. When Em- 
erson told Channing that if he (Emerson) could 
write as well as he did, he would write a great 
deal better, one readily sees what he means. And 
when Thoreau says of one of his callers, " I like 
his looks and the sound of his silence," the con- 
tradiction pleases one. But when he tells his 
friend that hate is the substratum of his love for 
him, words seem to have lost their meaning. Now 
and then he is guilty of sheer bragging, as when 
he says, " I would not go around the corner to see 
the world blow up." 

He often defies all our sense of fitness and propor- 
tion by the degree in which he magnifies the little 
and belittles the big. He says of the singing of a 
cricket which he heard under the border of some 
rock on the hillside one mid-May day, that it 
" makes the finest singing of birds outward and in- 
significant." " It is not so wildly melodious, but 
it is wiser and more mature than that of the wood 
thrush." His forced and meaningless analogies 
come out in such a comparison as this : " Most 
poems, like the fruits, are sweetest toward the blos- 
som end." Which is the blossom end of a poem ? 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

Thoreau advised one of his correspondents when 
he made garden to plant some Giant Regrets — 
they were good for sauce. It is certain that he 
himself planted some Giant Exaggerations and 
had a good yield. His exaggeration was deliberate. 
" Walden " is from first to last a most delightful 
sample of his talent. He belittles everything that 
goes on in the world outside his bean-field. Busi- 
ness, politics, institutions, governments, wars and 
rumors of wars, were not so much to him as the 
humming of a mosquito in his hut at Walden : 
" I am as much affected by the faint hum of a mos- 
quito making its invisible and unimaginable tour 
through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I 
was sitting with door and windows open, as I could 
be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was 
Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in 
the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. 
There was something cosmical about it." One 
wonders what he would have made of a blow-fly 
buzzing on the pane. 

He made Walden Pond famous because he made 
it the center of the universe and found life rich and 
full without many of the things that others deem 
necessary. There is a stream of pilgrims to Wal- 
den at all seasons, curious to see where so much 
came out of so little — where a man had lived who 
preferred poverty to riches, and solitude to so- 
ciety, who boasted that he could do without the 
143 



THE LAST HARVEST 

post office, the newspapers, the telegraph, and who 
had little use for the railroad, though he thought 
mankind had become a little more punctual since 
its invention. 

Another conspicuous fault as a writer is his fre- 
quent use of false analogies, or his comparison of 
things which have no ground of relationship, as 
when he says : "A day passed in the society of 
those Greek sages, such as described in the Ban- 
quet of Xenophon, would not be comparable with 
the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines, and the 
fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds." The word 
" wit " has no meaning when thus used. Or again 
where he says : " All great enterprises are self- 
supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain 
his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill 
feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes." Was 
there ever a more inept and untruthful com- 
parison? To find any ground of comparison be- 
tween the two things he compared, he must make 
his poet sustain his body by the scraps and lines 
of his poem which he rejects, or else the steam plan- 
ing-mill consume its finished product. 

" Let all things give way to the impulse of 
expression," he says, and he assuredly practiced 
what he had preached. 

One of his tricks of self- justification was to com- 
pare himself with inanimate objects, which is usu- 
ally as inept as to compare colors with sounds 
144 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

or perfumes : " My acquaintances sometimes im- 
ply that I am too cold," he writes, " but each thing 
is warm enough of its kind. Is the stone too cold 
which absorbs the heat of the summer sun and 
does not part with it during the night ? Crystals, 
though they be of ice are not too cold to melt. . . . 
Crystal does not complain of crystal any more than 
the dove of its mate." 

He strikes the same false note when, in discuss- 
ing the question of solitude at Walden he compares 
himself to the wild animals around him, and to 
inanimate objects, and says he was no more lonely 
than the loons on the pond, or than Walden itself : 
" I am no more lonely than a single mullein or 
dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or a sorrel, 
or a house-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more 
lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weather-cock, or 
the North Star, or the South Wind, or an April 
Shower, or a January Thaw, or the first spider in 
a new house." Did he imagine that any of these 
things were ever lonely? Man does get lonely, 
but Mill Brook and the North Star probably do 
not. 

If he sees anything unusual in nature, like galls 
on trees and plants, he must needs draw some 
moral from it, usually at the expense of the truth. 
For instance, he implies that the beauty of the 
oak galls is something that was meant to bloom 
in the flower, that the galls are the scarlet sins of 
145 



THE LAST HARVEST 

the tree, the tree's Ode to Dejection, yet he must 
have known that they are the work of an insect and 
are as healthy a growth as is the regular leaf. The 
insect gives the magical touch that transforms 
the leaf into a nursery for its young. Why de- 
ceive ourselves by believing that fiction is more 
interesting than fact ? But Thoreau is full of this 
sort of thing; he must have his analogy, true or 
false. 

He says that when a certain philosophical neigh- 
bor came to visit him in his hut at Walden, their 
discourse expanded and racked the little house : 
" I should not dare to say how many pounds' 
weight there was above the atmospheric pressure 
on every circular inch ; it opened its seams so that 
they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter 
to stop the consequent leak — but I had enough 
of that kind of oakum already picked." At the 
beginning of the paragraph he says that he and his 
philosopher sat down each with " some shingles of 
thoughts well dried," which they whittled, trying 
their knives and admiring the clear yellowish 
grain of the pumpkin pine. In a twinkling the 
three shingles of thought are transformed into 
fishes of thought in a stream into which the her- 
mit and the philosopher gently and reverently 
wade, without scaring or disturbing them. Then, 
presto ! the fish become a force, like the pressure of 
a tornado that nearly wrecks his cabin ! Surely 
146 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

this is tipsy rhetoric, and the work that can stand 
much of it, as " Walden " does, has a plus vitality 
that is rarely equaled. 

VI 

In " Walden " Thoreau, in playfully naming his 
various occupations, says, " For a long time I was 
reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, 
whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the 
bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common 
with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. 
However, in this case my pains were their own re- 
ward." If he were to come back now, he would, I 
think, open his eyes in astonishment, perhaps with 
irritation, to see the whole bulk of them at last in 
print. 

His Journal was the repository of all his writings, 
and was drawn upon during his lifetime for all the 
material he printed in books and contributed to the 
magazines. The fourteen volumes, I venture to 
say, form a record of the most minute and pains- 
taking details of what one man saw and heard on 
his walks in field and wood, in a single township, 
that can be found in any literature. 

It seems as though a man who keeps a Journal 
soon becomes its victim; at least that seems to 
have been the case with Thoreau. He lived for 
that Journal, he read for it, he walked for it; it 
was like a hungry, omnivorous monster that con- 
147 



THE LAST HARVEST 

stantly called for more. He transcribed to its 
pages from the books he read, he filled it with 
interminable accounts of the commonplace things 
he saw in his walks, tedious and minute descrip- 
tions of everything in wood, field, and swamp. 
There are whole pages of the Latin names of the 
common weeds and flowers. Often he could not 
wait till he got home to write out his notes. He 
walked by day and night, in cold and heat, in storm 
and sunshine, all for his Journal. All was fish 
that came to that net; nothing was too insignifi- 
cant to go in. He did not stop to make literature 
of it, or did not try, and it is rarely the raw ma- 
terial of literature. Its human interest is slight, 
its natural history interest slight also. For up- 
wards of twenty-five years Thoreau seemed to have 
lived for this Journal. It swelled to many volumes. 
It is a drag-net that nothing escapes. The general 
reader reads Thoreau's Journal as he does the book 
of Nature, just to cull out the significant things here 
and there. The vast mass of the matter is merely 
negative, like the things that we disregard in our 
walk. Here and there we see a flower, or a tree, or 
a prospect, or a bird, that arrests attention, but how 
much we pass by or over without giving it a thought ! 
And yet, just as the real nature-lover will scan 
eagerly the fine print in Nature's book, so will the 
student and enthusiast of Thoreau welcome all 
that is recorded in his Journals. 
148 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

Thoreau says that Channing in their walks to- 
gether sometimes took out his notebook and tried 
to write as he did, but all in vain. " He soon 
puts it up again, or contents himself with scrawl- 
ing some sketch of the landscape. Observing me 
still scribbling, he will say that he confines him- 
self to the ideal, purely ideal remarks; he leaves 
the facts to me. Sometimes, too, he will say, a 
little petulantly, * I am universal ; I have nothing 
to do with the particular and definite.' " The 
truth was Channing had no Journal calling, " More, 
more ! " and was not so inordinately fond of 
composition. " I, too," says Thoreau, " would 
fain set down something beside facts. Facts 
should only be as the frame to my pictures ; they 
should be material to the mythology which I am 
writing." But only rarely are his facts significant, 
or capable of an ideal interpretation. Felicitous 
strokes like that in which he says, " No tree has so 
fair a bole and so handsome an instep as the birch," 
are rare. 

Thoreau evidently had a certain companionship 
with his Journal. It was like a home-staying body 
to whom he told everything on his return from a 
walk. He loved to write it up. He made notes 
of his observations as he went along, night or day. 
One time he forgot his notebook and so substituted 
a piece of birch-bark. He must bring back some- 
thing gathered on the spot. He skimmed the 
149 



THE LAST HARVEST 

same country over and over; the cream he was 
after rose every day and all day, and in all sea- 
sons. 

He evidently loved to see the pages of his Jour- 
nal sprinkled with the Latin names of the plants 
and animals that he saw in his walk. A common 
weed with a long Latin name acquired new dignity. 
Occasionally he fills whole pages with the scientific 
names of the common trees and plants. He loved 
also a sprinkling of Latin quotations and allusions 
to old and little known authors. The pride of 
scholarship was strong in him. Suggestions from 
what we call the heathen world seemed to accord 
with his Gospel of the Wild. 

Thoreau loved to write as well as John Muir 
loved to talk. It was his ruling passion. He said 
time never passed so quickly as when he was writ- 
ing. It seemed as if the clock had been set back. 
He evidently went to Walden for subject-matter 
for his pen ; and the remarkable thing about it all 
is that he was always keyed up to the writing pitch. 
The fever of expression was always upon him. 
Day and night, winter and summer, it raged in his 
blood. He paused in his walks and wrote elabo- 
rately. The writing of his Journal must have 
taken as much time as his walking. 

Only Thoreau 's constant and unquenchable 
thirst for intellectual activity, and to supply ma- 
terial for that all-devouring Journal, can, to me, 
150 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

account for his main occupation during the greater 
part of the last two years of his life, which con- 
sisted in traversing the woods and measuring the 
trees and stumps and counting their rings. Ap- 
parently not a stump escaped him — pine, oak, 
birch, chestnut, maple, old or new, in the pasture 
or in the woods; he must take its measure and 
know its age. He must get the girth of every tree 
he passed and some hint of all the local conditions 
that had influenced its growth. Over two hun- 
dred pages of his Journal are taken up with bar- 
ren details of this kind. He cross-questions the 
stumps and trees as if searching for the clue to 
some important problem, but no such problem is 
disclosed. He ends where he begins. His vast 
mass of facts and figures was incapable of being 
generalized or systematized. His elaborate tables 
of figures, so carefully arranged, absolutely ac- 
curate, no doubt, are void of interest, because 
no valuable inferences can be drawn from them. 

" I have measured in all eight pitch pine stumps 
at the Tommy Wheeler hollow, sawed off within a 
foot of the ground. I measured the longest diam- 
eter and then at right angles with that, and took 
the average, and then selected the side of the stump 
on which the radius was of average length, and 
counted the number of rings in each inch, begin- 
ning at the center, thus : " And then follows a 
table of figures filling a page. " Of those eight, 
151 



THE LAST HARVEST 

average growth about one seventh of an inch per 
year. Calling the smallest number of rings in an 
inch in each tree one, the comparative slowness of 
growth of the inches is thus expressed." Then 
follows another carefully prepared table of figures. 
Before one is done with these pages one fairly sus- 
pects the writer is mad, the results are so useless, 
and so utterly fail to add to our knowledge 
of the woods. Would counting the leaves and 
branches in the forest, and making a pattern 
of each, and tabulating the whole mass of fig- 
ures be any addition to our knowledge? I at- 
tribute the whole procedure, as I have said, to his 
uncontrollable intellectual activity, and the im- 
aginary demands of this Journal, which continued 
to the end of his life. The very last pages of his 
Journal, a year previous to his death, are filled 
with minute accounts of the ordinary behavior of 
kittens, not one item novel or unusual, or throwing 
any light on the kitten. But it kept his mind busy, 
and added a page or two to the Journal. 

In his winter walks he usually carried a four- 
foot stick, marked in inches, and would measure 
the depth of the snow over large areas, every tenth 
step, and then construct pages of elaborate tables 
showing the variations according to locality, and 
then work out the average — an abnormal crav- 
ing for exact but useless facts. Thirty-four meas- 
urements on Walden disclosed the important fact 
152 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

that the snow averaged five and one sixth inches 
deep. He analyzes a pensile nest which he found 
in the woods — doubtless one of the vireo's — and 
fills ten pages with a minute description of the 
different materials which it contained. Then he 
analyzes a yellow-bird's nest, filling two pages. 
That Journal shall not go hungry, even if there is 
nothing to give it but the dry material of a bird's 
nest. 

VII 

The craving for literary expression in Thoreau was 
strong and constant, but, as he confesses, he could 
not always select a theme. " I am prepared not 
so much for contemplation as for forceful ex- 
pression." No matter what the occasion, " force- 
ful expression" was the aim. No meditation, or 
thinking, but sallies of the mind. All his paradoxes 
and false analogies and inconsistencies come from 
this craving for a forceful expression. He appar- 
ently brought to bear all the skill he possessed of 
this kind on all occasions. One must regard him, 
not as a great thinker, nor as a disinterested seeker 
after the truth, but as a master in the art of vig- 
orous and picturesque expression. To startle, to 
wake up, to communicate to his reader a little 
wholesome shock, is his aim. Not the novelty 
and freshness of his subject-matter concerns him 
but the novelty and unhackneyed character of his 
153 



THE LAST HARVEST 

literary style. That throughout the years a man 
should keep up the habit of walking, by night 
as well as by day, and bring such constant intel- 
lectual pressure to bear upon everything he saw, 
or heard, or felt, is remarkable. No evidence of 
relaxation, or of abandonment to the mere pleasure 
of the light and air and of green things growing, or of 
sauntering without thoughts of his Journal. He is 
as keyed up and strenuous in his commerce with the 
Celestial Empire as any tradesman in world goods 
that ever amassed a fortune. He sometimes wrote 
as he walked, and expanded and elaborated the 
same as in his study. On one occasion he dropped 
his pencil and could not find it, but he managed to 
complete the record. One night on his way to 
Conantum he speculates for nearly ten printed 
pages on the secret of being able to state a fact 
simply and adequately, or of making one's self the 
free organ of truth — a subtle and ingenious dis- 
cussion with the habitual craving for forceful ex- 
pression. In vain I try to put myself in the place 
of a man who goes forth into wild nature with mal- 
ice prepense to give free swing to his passion for 
forcible expression. I suppose all nature-writers 
go forth on their walks or strolls to the fields and 
woods with minds open to all of Nature's genial 
influences and significant facts and incidents, but 
rarely, I think, with the strenuousness of Thoreau 
— grinding the grist as they go along. 
154 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

Thoreau compares himself to the bee that goes 
forth in quest of honey for the hive : " How to 
extract honey from the flower of the world. That 
is my everyday business. I am as busy as the bee 
about it. I ramble over all fields on that errand 
and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy 
with honey and wax." To get material for his 
Journal was as much his business as it was the 
bee's to get honey for his comb. He apparently 
did not know that the bee does not get honey nor 
wax directly from the flowers, but only nectar, or 
sweet water. The bee, as I have often said, makes 
the honey and the wax after she gets home to the 
swarm. She puts the nectar through a process of 
her own, adds a drop of her own secretion to it, 
namely, formic acid, the water evaporates, and 
lo ! the tang and pungency of honey ! 

VIII 
There can be little doubt that in his practical 
daily life we may credit Thoreau with the friend- 
liness and neighborliness that his friend Dr. Edward 
W. Emerson claims for him. In a recent letter to 
me, Dr. Emerson writes : " He carried the old New 
England undemonstrativeness very far. He was 
also, I believe, really shy, prospered only in mono- 
logue, except in a walk in the woods with one com- 
panion, and his difficulties increased to impossi- 
bility in a room full of people." Dr. Emerson ad- 

155 



THE LAST HARVEST 

mits that Thoreau is himself to blame for giving 
his readers the impression that he held his kind in 
contempt, but says that in reality he had neighbor- 
liness, was dutiful to parents and sisters, showed 
courtesy to women and children and an open, 
friendly side to many a simple, uncultivated 
townsman. 

This practical helpfulness and friendliness in 
Thoreau's case seems to go along with the secret 
contempt he felt and expressed in his Journal 
toward his fellow townsmen. At one time he was 
chosen among the selectmen to perambulate the 
town lines — an old annual custom. One day 
they perambulated the Lincoln line, the next day 
the Bedford line, the next day the Carlisle line, 
and so on, and kept on their rounds for a week. 
Thoreau felt soiled and humiliated. " A fatal 
coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial af- 
fairs of men. Though I have been associating 
even with the select men of this and adjoining 
towns, I feel inexpressibly begrimed." How 
fragile his self-respect was ! Yet he had friends 
among the surrounding farmers, whose society and 
conversation he greatly valued. 

That Thoreau gave the impression of being 
what country folk call a crusty person — curt and 
forbidding in manner — seems pretty well es- 
tablished. His friend Alcott says he was deficient 
in the human sentiments. Emerson, who, on the 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

whole, loved and admired him, says : " Thoreau 
sometimes appears only as a gendarme, good to 
knock down a cockney with, but without that 
power to cheer and establish which makes the value 
of a friend." Again he says : " If I knew only 
Thoreau, I should think cooperation of good men 
impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and 
never once for truth, for comfort, and joy ? Cen- 
trality he has, and penetration, strong understand- 
ing, and the higher gifts, — the insight of the real, 
or from the real, and the moral rectitude that be- 
longs to it ; but all this and all his resources of wit 
and invention are lost to me, in every experiment, 
year after year, that I make, to hold intercourse 
with his mind. Always some weary captious para- 
dox to fight you with, and the time and temper 
wasted." " It is curious," he again says, " that 
Thoreau goes to a house to say with little preface 
what he has just read or observed, delivers it in a 
lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or 
thought which any of the company offer on the 
matter, nay, is merely interrupted by it, and when 
he has finished his report departs with precipita- 
tion." 

It is interesting in this connection to put along- 
side of these rather caustic criticisms a remark in 
kind recorded by Thoreau in his Journal concern- 
ing Emerson : " Talked, or tried to talk, with 
R. W. E. Lost my time — nay, almost my iden- 
157 



THE LAST HARVEST 

tity. He, assuming a false opposition where there 
was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind — 
told me what I knew — and I lost my time trying 
to imagine myself somebody else to oppose him." 

Evidently Concord philosophers were not al- 
ways in concord. 

More characteristic of Emerson is the incident 
Thoreau relates of his driving his own calf, which 
had just come in with the cows, out of the yard, 
thinking it belonged to a drove that was then going 
by. From all accounts Emerson was as slow to 
recognize his own thoughts when Alcott and Chan- 
ning aired them before him as he was to recog- 
nize his own calf. 

" I have got a load of great hardwood stumps," 
writes Thoreau, and then, as though following out 
a thought suggested by them, he adds : " For 
sympathy with my neighbors I might about as 
well live in China. They are to me barbarians 
with their committee works and gregariousness." 

Probably the stumps were from trees that grew 
on his neighbors' farms and were a gift to him. 
Let us hope the farmers did not deliver them to 
him free of charge. He complained that the thou- 
sand and one gentlemen that he met were all alike ; 
he was not cheered by the hope of any rudeness 
from them : "A cross man, a coarse man, an 
eccentric man, a silent man who does not drill 
well — of him there is some hope," he declares. 
158 



ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

Herein we get a glimpse of the Thoreau ideal which 
led his friend Alcott to complain that he lacked 
the human sentiment. He may or may not have 
been a " cross man," but he certainly did not 
" drill well," for which his readers have reason to 
be thankful. Although Thoreau upholds the cross 
and the coarse man, one would really like to know 
with what grace he would have put up with gratui- 
tous discourtesy or insult. I remember an entry in 
his Journal in which he tells of feeling a little 
cheapened when a neighbor asked him to take 
some handbills and leave them at a certain place 
as he passed on his walk. 

A great deal of the piquancy and novelty in 
Thoreau come from the unexpected turn he gives 
to things, upsetting all our preconceived notions. 
His trick of exaggeration he rather brags of : " Ex- 
pect no trivial truth from me," he says, " unless 
I am on the witness stand." He even exaggerates 
his own tendency to exaggeration. It is all a part 
of his scheme to startle and wake people up. He 
exaggerates his likes, and he exaggerates his dis- 
likes, and he exaggerates his indifference. It is a 
way he has of bragging. The moment he puts pen 
to paper the imp of exaggeration seizes it. He 
lived to see the beginning of the Civil War, and in 
a letter to a friend expressed his indifference in re- 
gard to Fort Sumter and " Old Abe," and all that, 
yet Mr. Sanborn says he was as zealous about the 
159 



THE LAST HARVEST 

war as any soldier. The John Brown tragedy 
made him sick, and the war so worked upon his 
feelings that in his failing state of health he said 
he could never get well while it lasted. His passion 
for Nature and the wild carried him to the ex- 
tent of looking with suspicion, if not with positive 
dislike, upon all of man's doings and institutions. 
All civil and political and social organizations 
received scant justice at his hands. He instantly 
espoused the cause of John Brown and championed 
him in the most public manner because he (Brown) 
defied the iniquitous laws and fell a martyr to the 
cause of justice and right. If he had lived in our 
times, one would have expected him, in his letters 
to friends, to pooh-pooh the World War that has 
drenched Europe with blood, while in his heart he 
would probably have been as deeply moved about 
it as any of us were. 

Thoreau must be a stoic, he must be an egotist, 
he must be illogical, whenever he puts pen to pa- 
per. This does not mean that he was a hypocrite, 
but it means that on his practical human side he 
did not differ so much from the rest of us, but that 
in his mental and spiritual life he pursued ideal 
ends with a seriousness that few of us are equal to. 
He loved to take an air-line. In his trips about 
the country to visit distant parts, he usually took 
the roads and paths or means of conveyance that 
other persons took, but now and then he would 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

lay down his ruler on the map, draw a straight 
line to the point he proposed to visit, and follow 
that, going through the meadows and gardens and 
door-yards of the owners of the property in his 
line of march. There is a tradition that he and 
Channing once went through a house where the 
front and back door stood open. In his mental 
flights and excursions he follows this plan almost 
entirely; the hard facts and experiences of life 
trouble him very little. He can always ignore 
them or sail serenely above them. 

How is one to reconcile such an expression as 
this with what his friends report of his actual life : 
" My countrymen are to me foreigners. I have 
but little more sympathy with them than with the 
mobs of India or China " ? Or this about his 
Concord neighbors, as he looks down upon them 
from a near-by hill : " On whatever side I look off, 
I am reminded of the mean and narrow-minded 
men whom I have lately met there. What can 
be uglier than a country occupied by grovelling, 
coarse, and low-minded men ? — no scenery can 
redeem it. Hornets, hyenas, and baboons are not 
so great a curse to a country as men of a similar 
character." Tried by his ideal standards, his 
neighbors and his countrymen generally were, of 
course, found wanting, yet he went about among 
them helpful and sympathetic and enjoyed his life 
to the last gasp. These things reveal to us what 
161 



THE LAST HARVEST 

a gulf there may be between a man's actual life 
and the high altitudes in which he disports him- 
self when he lets go his imagination. 

IX 

In his paper called " Life without Principle," 
his radical idealism comes out : To work for money, 
or for subsistence alone, is life without principle. 
A man must work for the love of the work. Get 
a man to work for you who is actuated by love for 
you or for the work alone. Find some one to beat 
your rugs and carpets and clean out your well, or 
weed your onion-patch, who is not influenced by 
any money consideration. This were ideal, in- 
deed; this suggests paradise. Thoreau probably 
loved his lecturing, and his surveying, and his mag- 
azine writing, and the money these avocations 
brought him did not seem unworthy, but could 
the business and industrial world safely adopt that 
principle ? 

So far as I understand him, we all live without 
principle when we do anything that goes against the 
grain, or for money, or for bread alone. " To 
have done anything by which you earned money is 
to have been truly idle or worse." " If you would 
get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be 
popular, which is to go down perpendicularly." 
Yet his neighbor Emerson was in much demand 
as a lecturer, and earned a good deal of money in 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

that way. Truly idealists like Thoreau are hard 
to satisfy. Agassiz said he could not afford to 
give his time to making money, but how many 
Agassiz are there in the world at any one time? 
Such a man as our own Edison is influenced very 
little by the commercial value of his inventions. 
This is as it should be, but only a small fraction of 
mankind do or can live to ideal ends. Those who 
work for love are certainly the lucky ones, and are 
exceptionally endowed. It is love of the sport 
that usually sends one a-fishing or a-hunting, and 
this gives it the sanction of the Gospel according 
to Thoreau. Bradford Torrey saw a man sitting 
on a log down in Florida who told him, when he 
asked about his occupation, that he had no time 
to work ! It is to be hoped that Thoreau enjoyed 
his surveying, as he probably did, especially when 
it took him through sphagnum swamps or scrub- 
oak thickets or a tangle of briers and thorns. The 
more difficult the way, the more he could summon 
his philosophy. " You must get your living by 
loving." It is a hard saying, but it is a part of 
his gospel. But as he on one occasion worked 
seventy-six days surveying, for only one dollar a 
day, the money he received should not be laid up 
against him. 

As a matter of fact we find Thoreau frequently 
engaging in manual labor to earn a little money. 
He relates in his Journal of 1857 that while he was 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

living in the woods he did various jobs about town 
— fence-building, painting, gardening, carpentering : 

One day a man came from the east edge of the town 
and said that he wanted to get me to brick up a fire- 
place, etc., etc., for him. I told him that I was not a 
mason, but he knew that I had built my own house en- 
tirely and would not take no for an answer. So I went. 

It was three miles off, and I walked back and forth 
each day, arriving early and working as late as if I were 
living there. The man was gone away most of the 
time, but had left some sand dug up in his cow-yard 
for me to make mortar with. I bricked up a fireplace, 
papered a chamber, but my principal work was white- 
washing ceilings. Some were so dirty that many coats 
would not conceal the dirt. In the kitchen I finally 
resorted to yellow-wash to cover the dirt. I took my 
meals there, sitting down with my employer (when he 
got home) and his hired men. I remember the awful 
condition of the sink, at which I washed one day, and 
when I came to look at what was called the towel I 
passed it by and wiped my hands on the air, and there- 
after I resorted to the pump. I worked there hard 
three days, charging only a dollar a day. 

About the same time I also contracted to build a 
wood-shed of no mean size, for, I think, exactly six dol- 
lars, and cleared about half of it by a close calculation 
and swift working. The tenant wanted me to throw 
in a gutter and latch, but I carried off the board that 
was left and gave him no latch but a button. It stands 
yet, — behind the Kettle house. I broke up Johnny 
Kettle's old "trow," in which he kneaded his bread, 
for material. Going home with what nails were left in 
a flower [sic !] bucket on my arm, in a rain, I was about 
getting into a hay-rigging, when my umbrella frightened 
the horse, and he kicked at me over the fills, smashed 
the bucket on my arm, and stretched me on my back ; 

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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

but while I lay on my back, his leg being caught under 
the shaft, I got up, to see him sprawling on the other 
side. This accident, the sudden bending of my body 
backwards, sprained my stomach so that I did not get 
quite strong there for several years, but had to give up 
some fence-building and other work which I had under- 
taken from time to time. 

I built the common slat fence for $1.50 per rod, or 
worked for $1.00 per day. I built six fences. 

These homely and laborious occupations show 
the dreamer and transcendentalist of Walden in 
a very interesting light. In his practical life he 
was a ready and resourceful man and could set his 
neighbors a good example, and no doubt give them 
good advice. But what fun he had with his cor- 
respondents when they wrote him for practical 
advice about the conduct of their lives ! One of 
them had evidently been vexing his soul over the 
problem of Church and State : " Why not make a 
very large mud pie and bake it in the sun ? Only 
put no Church nor State into it, nor upset any 
other pepper box that way. Dig out a woodchuck 
— for that has nothing to do with rotting institu- 
tions. Go ahead." 

Dear, old-fashioned Wilson Flagg, who wrote 
pleasantly, but rather tamely, about New England 
birds and seasons, could not profit much from 
Thoreau's criticism : " He wants stirring up with 
a pole. He should practice turning a series of 
summer-sets rapidly, or jump up and see how many 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

times he can strike his feet together before coming 
down. Let him make the earth turn round now 
the other way, and whet his wits on it as on a 
grindstone; in short, see how many ideas he can 
entertain at once." 

Expect no Poor Richard maxims or counsel 
from Thoreau. He would tell you to invest your 
savings in the bonds of the Celestial Empire, or 
plant your garden with a crop of Giant Regrets. 
He says these are excellent for sauce. He en- 
courages one of his correspondents with the state- 
ment that he " never yet knew the sun to be 
knocked down and rolled through a mud puddle; 
he comes out honor bright from behind every 
storm." 

X 

All Thoreau's apparent inconsistencies and con- 
tradictions come from his radical idealism. In all 
his judgments upon men and things, and upon 
himself, he is an uncompromising idealist. All 
fall short. Add his habit of exaggeration and you 
have him saying that the pigs in the street in New 
York (in 1843) are the most respectable part of the 
population. The pigs, I suppose, lived up to the 
pig standard, but the people did not live up to the 
best human standards. Wherever the ideal leads 
him, there he follows. After his brother John's 
death he said he did not wish ever to see John 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

again, but only the ideal John — that other John 
of whom he was but the imperfect representative. 
Yet the loss of the real John was a great blow to 
him, probably the severest in his life. But he 
never allows himself to go on record as showing 
any human weakness. 

" Comparatively," he says, " we can excuse 
any offense against the heart, but not against the 
imagination." Thoreau probably lived in his 
heart as much as most other persons, but his pe- 
culiar gospel is the work of his imagination. He 
could turn his idealism to practical account. A 
man who had been camping with him told me that 
on such expeditions he carried a small piece of 
cake carefully wrapped up in his pocket and that 
after he had eaten his dinner he would take a 
small pinch of this cake. His imagination seemed 
to do the rest. 

The most unpromising subject would often 
kindle the imagination of Thoreau. His imagina- 
tion fairly runs riot over poor Bill Wheeler, a crip- 
ple and a sot who stumped along on two clumps 
for feet, and who earned his grog by doing chores 
here and there. One day Thoreau found him 
asleep in the woods in a low shelter which consisted 
of meadow hay cast over a rude frame. It was 
a rare find to Thoreau. A man who could turn 
his back upon the town and civilization like that 
must be some great philosopher, greater than 
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Socrates or Diogenes, living perhaps " from a deep 
principle," " simplifying life, returning to na- 
ture," having put off many things, — " luxuries, 
comforts, human society, even his feet, — wres- 
tling with his thoughts." He outdid himself. He 
out-Thoreaued Thoreau : " Who knows but in 
his solitary meadow-hay bunk he indulges, in 
thought, only in triumphant satires on men? 
[More severe than those of the Walden hermit?] 
I was not sure for a moment but here was a 
philosopher who had left far behind him the phi- 
losophers of Greece and India, and I envied him 
his advantageous point of view — " with much 
more to the same effect. 

Thoreau's reaction from the ordinary humdrum, 
respectable, and comfortable country life was so 
intense, and his ideal of the free and austere life he 
would live so vivid, that he could thus see in this 
besotted vagabond a career and a degree of wis- 
dom that he loved to contemplate. 

One catches eagerly at any evidence of tender 
human emotions in Thoreau, his stoical indifference 
is so habitual with him : "I laughed at myself 
the other day to think that I cried while reading 
a pathetic story." And he excuses himself by 
saying, " It is not I, but Nature in me, which was 
stronger than I." 

It was hard for Thoreau to get interested in 
young women. He once went to an evening party 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

of thirty or forty of them, " in a small room, warm 
and noisy." He was introduced to two of them, 
but could not hear what they said, there was such 
a cackling. He concludes by saying : " The so- 
ciety of young women is the most unprofitable I 
have ever tried. They are so light and flighty 
that you can never be sure whether they are there 
or not." 

XI 

As a philosopher or expositor and interpreter of a 
principle, Thoreau is often simply grotesque. His 
passion for strong and striking figures usually gets 
the best of him. In discussing the relation that 
exists between the speaker or lecturer and his au- 
dience he says, " The lecturer will read best those 
parts of his lecture which are best heard," as if 
the reading did not precede the hearing ! Then 
comes this grotesque analogy : "I saw some men 
unloading molasses-hogsheads from a truck at a 
depot the other day, rolling them up an inclined 
plane. The truckman stood behind and shoved, 
after putting a couple of ropes, one round each 
end of the hogshead, while two men standing in the 
depot steadily pulled at the ropes. The first man 
was the lecturer, the last was the audience." I 
suppose the hogshead stands for the big thoughts 
of the speaker which he cannot manage at all with- 
out the active cooperation of the audience. The 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

truth is, people assemble in a lecture hall in a pas- 
sive but expectant frame of mind. They are ready 
to be pleased or displeased. They are there like 
an instrument to be played upon by the orator. 
He may work his will with them. Without their 
sympathy his success will not be great, but the 
triumph of his art is to win their sympathy. Those 
who went to scoff when the Great Preacher spoke, 
remained to pray. No man could speak as elo- 
quently to empty seats, or to a dummy audience, 
as to a hall filled with intelligent people, yet 
Thoreau's ropes and hogsheads and pulling and 
pushing truckmen absurdly misrepresent the true 
relation that exists between a speaker and his 
hearers. Of course a speaker finds it uphill work 
if his audience is not with him, but that it is not 
with him is usually his own fault. 

Thoreau's merits as a man and a writer are so 
many and so great that I have not hesitated to 
make much of his defects. Indeed, I have with 
malice aforethought ransacked his works to find 
them. But after they are all charged up against 
him, the balance that remains on the credit side of 
the account is so great that they do not disturb us. 

There has been but one Thoreau, and we should 
devoutly thank the gods of New England for the 
precious gift. Thoreau's work lives and will con- 
tinue to live because, in the first place, the world 
loves a writer who can flout it and turn his back 
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ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU 

upon it and yet make good ; and again because the 
books which he gave to the world have many and 
very high literary and ethical values. They are 
fresh, original, and stimulating. He drew a gospel 
out of the wild; he brought messages from the 
wood gods to men ; he made a lonely pond in 
Massachusetts a fountain of the purest and most 
elevating thoughts, and, with his great neighbor 
Emerson, added new luster to a town over which 
the muse of our colonial history had long loved to 
dwell. 



m 



IV 

A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 



It is never safe to question Darwin's facts, but it 
is always safe to question any man's theories. It 
is with Darwin's theories that I am mainly con- 
cerned here. He has already been shorn of his 
selection doctrines as completely as Samson was 
shorn of his locks, but there are other phases of his 
life and teachings that invite discussion. 

The study of Darwin's works begets such an 
affection for the man, for the elements of character 
displayed on every page, that one is slow in con- 
vincing one's self that anything is wrong with his 
theories. There is danger that one's critical judg- 
ment will be blinded by one's partiality for the 
man. 

For the band of brilliant men who surrounded 
him and championed his doctrines — Spencer, 
Huxley, Lyall, Hooker, and others — one feels 
nothing more personal than admiration; unless 
the eloquent and chivalrous Huxley — the knight 
in shining armor of the Darwinian theory — 
inspires a warmer feeling. Darwin himself almost 
172 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

disarms one by his amazing candor and his utter 
self-abnegation. The question always paramount 
in his mind is, What is the truth about this mat- 
ter ? What fact have you got for me, he seems to 
say, that will upset my conclusion? If you have 
one, that is just what I am looking for. 

Could we have been permitted to gaze upon the 
earth in the middle geologic period, in Jurassic or 
Triassic times, we should have seen it teeming with 
huge, uncouth, gigantic forms of animal life, in the 
sea, on the land, and in the air, and with many 
lesser forms, but with no sign of man anywhere; 
ransack the earth from pole to pole and there was 
no sign or suggestion, so far as we could have seen, 
of a human being. 

Come down the stream of time several millions 
of years — to our own geologic age — and we find 
the earth swarming with the human species like 
an ant-hill with ants, and with a vast number of 
forms not found in the Mesozoic era; and the 
men are doing to a large part of the earth what the 
ants do to a square rod of its surface. Where did 
they come from ? We cannot, in our day, believe 
that a hand reached down from heaven, or up from 
below, and placed them there. There is no alter- 
native but to believe that in some way they arose 
out of the antecedent animal life of the globe ; in 
other words that man is the result of the process of 
evolution, and that all other existing forms of life, 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

vegetable and animal, are a product of the same 
movement. 

To explain how this came about, what factors 
and forces entered into the transformation, is the 
task that Darwin set himself. It was a mighty 
task, and whether or not his solution of the prob- 
lem stands the test of time, we must yet bow in 
reverence before one of the greatest of natural 
philosophers; for even to have conceived this 
problem thus clearly, and to have placed it in in- 
telligible form before men's minds, is a great 
achievement. 

Darwin was as far from being as sure of the truth 
of Darwinism as many of his disciples were, and 
still are. He said in 1860, in a letter to one of his 
American correspondents, " I have never for a mo- 
ment doubted that, though I cannot see my errors, 
much of my book [" The Origin of Species "] will 
be proved erroneous." Again he said, in 1862, 
" I look at it as absolutely certain that very much 
in the * Origin ' will be proved rubbish ; but I ex- 
pect and hope that the framework will stand." 

Its framework is the theory of Evolution, which 
is very sure to stand. In its inception his theory 
is half -miracle and half -fact. He assumes that 
in the beginning (as if there ever was or could be 
a " beginning," in that sense) God created a few 
forms, animal and vegetable, and then left it to the 
gods of Evolution, the chief of which is Natural 
174 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

Selection, to do the rest. While Darwin would 
not admit any predetermining factors in Evolu- 
tion, or that any innate tendency to progressive 
development existed, he said he could not look 
upon the world of living things as the result of 
chance. Yet in fortuitous, or chance, variation he 
saw one of the chief factors of Evolution. 

The world of Chance into which Darwinism 
delivers us — what can the thoughtful mind make 
of it? 

That life with all its myriad forms is the result 
of chance is, according to Professor Osborn, a bio- 
logical dogma. He everywhere uses the word 
" chance " as opposed to law, or to the sequence of 
cause and effect. This, it seems to me, is a misuse 
of the term. Is law, in this sense, ever suspended 
or annulled ? If one chances to fall off his horse or 
his house, is it not gravity that pulls him down? 
Are not the laws of energy everywhere operative 
in all movements of matter in the material world ? 
Chance is not opposed to law, but to design. Any- 
thing that befalls us that was not designed is a 
matter of chance. The fortuitous enters largely 
into all human life. If I carelessly toss a stone 
across the road, it is a matter of chance just where 
it will fall, but its course is not lawless. Does not 
gravity act upon it ? does not the resistance of the 
air act upon it ? does not the muscular force of my 
arm act upon it? and does not this complex of 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

physical forces determine the precise spot where 
the stone shall fall? If, in its fall, it were to hit 
a bird or a mouse or a flower, that would be a mat- 
ter of chance, so far as my will was concerned. Is 
not a meteoric stone falling out of space acted upon 
by similar forces, which determine where it shall 
strike the earth ? In this case, we must substitute 
for the energy of my arm the cosmic energy that 
gives the primal impetus to all heavenly bodies. 
If the falling aerolite were to hit a person or a 
house, we should say it was a matter of chance, 
because it was not planned or designed. But when 
the shells of the long-range guns hit their invisible 
target or the bombs from the airplanes hit their 
marks, chance plays a part, because all the factors 
that enter into the problem are not and cannot be 
on the instant accurately measured. The col- 
lision of two heavenly bodies in the depth of space, 
which does happen, is, from our point of view, a 
matter of chance, although governed by inexorable 
law. 

The forms of inanimate objects — rocks, hills, 
rivers, lakes — are matters of chance, since they 
serve no purpose : any other form would be as 
fit ; but the forms of living things are always pur- 
poseful. Is it possible to believe that the human 
body, with all its complicated mechanism, its 
many wonderful organs of secretion and excretion 
and assimilation, is any more matter of chance 
176 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

than a watch or a phonograph is? Though what 
agent to substitute for the word " chance," I confess 
I do not know. The short cut to an omnipotent 
Creator sitting apart from the thing created will 
not satisfy the naturalist. And to make energy 
itself creative, as Professor Osborn does, is only to 
substitute one god for another. I can no more 
think of the course of organic evolution as being 
accidental in the Darwinian sense, than I can think 
of the evolution of the printing-press or the aero- 
plane as being accidental, although chance has 
played its part. Can we think of the first little 
horse of which we have any record, the eohippus 
of three or four millions of years ago, as evolving 
by accidental variations into the horse of our time, 
without presupposing an equine impulse to devel- 
opment ? As well might we trust our ships to the 
winds and waves with the expectation that they 
will reach their several ports. 

Are we to believe that we live in an entirely 
mechanical and fortuitous world — a world which 
has no interior, which is only a maze of acting, 
reacting, and interacting of blind physical forces? 
According to the chance theory, the struggle of a 
living body to exist does not differ from the vicis- 
situdes of, say, water seeking an equilibrium, or 
heat a uniform temperature. 

Chance has played an important part in human 
history, and in all life-history — often, no doubt, 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

the main part — since history began. It was by 
chance that Columbus discovered America; he 
simply blundered upon it. He had set out on 
his voyage with something quite different in 
view. But his ship, and the crew, and the voy- 
age itself, were not matters of chance but of 
purpose. 

According to the selectionists' theory, chance 
gave the bird its wings, the fish its fins, the por- 
cupine its quills, the skunk its fetid secretion, the 
cuttlefish its ink, the swordfish its sword, the 
electric eel its powerful battery ; it gave the giraffe 
its long neck, the camel its hump, the horse its 
hoof, the ruminants their horns and double stom- 
ach, and so on. According to Weismann, it gave 
us our eyes, our ears, our hands with the fingers 
and opposing thumb, it gave us all the complicated 
and wonderful organs of our bodies, and all their 
circulation, respiration, digestion, assimilation, 
secretion, excretion, reproduction. All we are, 
or can be, the selectionist credits to Natural 
Selection. 

Try to think of that wonderful organ, the eye, 
with all its marvelous powers and adaptations, as 
the result of what we call chance or Natural Se- 
lection. Well may Darwin have said that the eye 
made him shudder when he tried to account for it 
by Natural Selection. Why, its adaptations in 
one respect alone, minor though they be, are 
178 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

enough to stagger any number of selectionists. I 
refer to the rows of peculiar glands that secrete an 
oily substance, differing in chemical composition 
from any other secretion, a secretion which keeps 
the eyelids from sticking together in sleep. " Be- 
havior as lawless as snowflakes," says Whitman 
— a phrase which probably stuck to him from 
Rousseau; but are snowflakes and raindrops law- 
less? To us creatures of purpose, they are so be- 
cause the order of their falling is haphazard. They 
obey their own laws. Again we see chance work- 
ing inside of law. 

When the sower scatters the seed-grains from his 
hand, he does not and cannot determine the point 
of soil upon which any of them shall fall, but there 
is design in his being there and in sowing the seed. 
Astronomy is an exact science, biology is not. 
The celestial events always happen on time. The 
astronomers can tell us to the fraction of a second 
when the eclipses of the sun and moon and the 
transit of the inferior planets across the sun's disk 
will take place. They know and have measured 
all the forces that bring them about. Now, if we 
knew with the same mathematical precision all the 
elements that enter into the complex of forces 
which shapes our lives, could we forecast the future 
with the same accuracy with which the astrono- 
mers forecast the movements of the orbs? or are 
there incommensurable factors in life ? 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

II 

How are we to reconcile the obvious hit-and-miss 
method of Nature with the reign of law, or with a 
world of design ? Consider the seeds of a plant or 
a tree, as sown by the wind. It is a matter of 
chance where they alight; it is hit or miss with 
them always. Yet the seeds, say, of the cat-tail 
flag always find the wet or the marshy places. If 
they had a topographical map of the country and 
a hundred eyes they could not succeed better. Of 
course, there are vastly more failures than suc- 
cesses with them, but one success in ten thousand 
trials is enough. They go to all points of the com- 
pass with the wind, and sooner or later hit the 
mark. Chance decides where the seed shall fall, 
but it was not chance that gave wings to this and 
other seeds. The hooks and wings and springs 
and parachutes that wind-sown seeds possess are 
not matters of chance : they all show design. So 
here is design working in a hit-and-miss world. 

There are chance details in any general plan. 
The general forms which a maple or an oak or an 
elm takes in the forest or in the field are fixed, but 
many of the details are quite accidental. All the 
individual trees of a species have a general resem- 
blance, but one differs from another in the number 
and exact distribution of the branches, and in 
many other ways. We cannot solve the fun- 
damental problems of biology by addition and 
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A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

subtraction. He who sees nothing transcendent 
and mysterious in the universe does not see deeply ; 
he lacks that vision without which the people 
perish. All organic and structural changes are 
adaptive from the first ; they do not need natural 
selection to whip them into shape. All it can do 
is to serve as a weeding-out process. 

Acquired characters are not inherited, but those 
organic changes which are the result of the in- 
dwelling impulse of development are inherited. So 
dominant and fundamental are the results of this 
impulse that cross-breeding does not wipe them out. 

Ill 

While I cannot believe that we live in a world 
of chance, any more than Darwin could, yet 
I feel that I am as free from any teleological 
taint as he was. The world-old notion of a 
creator and director, sitting apart from the uni- 
verse and shaping and controlling all its affairs, 
a magnified king or emperor, finds no lodgment in 
my mind. Kings and despots have had their day, 
both in heaven and on earth. The universe is a 
democracy. The Whole directs the Whole. Every 
particle plays its own part, and yet the universe is 
a unit as much as is the human body, with 
all its myriad of individual cells, and all its many 
separate organs functioning in harmony. And 
the mind I see in nature is just as obvious as the 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

mind I see in myself, and subject to the same im- 
perfections and limitations. 

In following Lamarck I am not disturbed by the 
bogey of teleology, or the ghost of mysticism. I 
am persuaded that there is something immanent 
in the universe, pervading every atom and mole- 
cule in it, that knows what it wants — a Cosmic 
Mind or Intelligence that we must take account of 
if we would make any headway in trying to under- 
stand the world in which we find ourselves. 

When we deny God it is always in behalf of 
some other god. We are compelled to recognize 
something not ourselves from which we proceed, 
and in which we live and move and have our be- 
ing, call it energy, or will, or Jehovah, or Ancient 
of Days. We cannot deny it because we are a part 
of it. As well might the fountain deny the sea or 
the cloud. Each of us is a fraction of the universal 
Eternal Intelligence. Is it unscientific to believe 
that our own minds have their counterpart or their 
origin in the nature of which we form a part? Is 
our own intelligence all there is of mind-manifes- 
tation in the universe? Where did we get this 
divine gift? Did we take all there was of it? 
Certainly we did not ourselves invent it. It would 
require considerable wit to do that. Mind is 
immanent in nature, but in man alone it becomes 
self-conscious. Wherever there is adaptation of 
means to an end, there is mind. 
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A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

Yet we use the terms " guidance," " predeter- 
mination," and so on, at the risk of being misun- 
derstood. All such terms are charged with the 
meaning that our daily lives impart to them and, 
when applied to the processes of the Cosmos, are only 
half-truths. From our experience with objects and 
forces in this world, the earth ought to rest upon 
something, and that object upon something, and the 
moon ought to fall upon the earth, and the earth fall 
into the sun, and, in fact, the whole sidereal system 
ought to collapse. But it does not, and will not. 
As nearly as we can put it into words, the whole 
visible universe floats in a boundless and fathomless 
sea of energy ; and that is all we know about it. 

If chance brought us here and endowed us with 
our bodies and our minds, and keeps us here, and 
adapts us to the world in which we live, is not 
Chance a good enough god for any of us? Or if 
Natural Selection did it, or orthogenesis or epi- 
genesis, or any other genesis, have we not in any of 
these found a god equal to the occasion ? Darwin 
goes wrong, if I may be allowed to say so, when he 
describes or characterizes the activities of Nature 
in terms of our own activities. Man's selection 
affords no clue to Nature's selection, and the best 
to man is not the best to Nature. For instance, 
she is concerned with color and form only so far as 
they have survival value. We are concerned more 
with intrinsic values. 

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THE LAST HARVEST 

" Man," says Darwin, " selects only for his 
own good ; Nature only for the good of the being 
which she tends." But Nature's good is of an- 
other order than man's : it is the good of all. Na- 
ture aims at a general good, man at a particular 
good to himself. Man waters his garden; Na- 
ture sends the rain broadcast upon the just and 
the unjust, upon the sea as upon the land. Man 
directs and controls his planting and his harvest- 
ing along specific lines : he selects his seed and 
prepares his soil; Nature has no system in this 
respect: she trusts her seeds to the winds and 
the waters, and to beasts and birds, and her har- 
vest rarely fails. 

Nature's methods, we say, are blind, haphazard ; 
the wind blows where it listeth, and the seeds fall 
where the winds and waters carry them ; the frosts 
blight this section and spare that ; the rains flood 
the country in the West and the drought burns up 
the vegetation in the East. And yet we survive 
and prosper. Nature averages up well. We see 
nothing like purpose or will in her total scheme of 
things, yet inside her hit-and-miss methods, her 
storms and tornadoes and earthquakes and dis- 
tempers, we see a fundamental benefaction. If 
it is not good-will, it amounts to the same thing. 
Our fathers saw special providences, but we see 
only unchangeable laws. To compare Nature's 
selection with man's selection is like arguing from 
184 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN. 

man's art to Nature's art. Nature has no art, no 
architecture, no music. Her temples, as the poets 
tell us, are the woods, her harps the branches of 
the trees, her minstrels the birds and insects, her 
gardens the fields and waysides — all safe com- 
parisons for purposes of literature, but not for 
purposes of science. 

Man alone selects, or works by a definite method. 
Might we not as well say that Nature ploughs 
and plants and trims and harvests ? We pick out 
our favorites among plants and animals, those that 
best suit our purpose. We go straight to our 
object, with as little delay and waste as possible. 
Not so Nature. Her course is always a round- 
about one. Our petty economies are no concern 
of hers. Our choice selection of rich milkers, pro- 
lific poultry, or heavy-fleeced sheep is with her 
quickly sacrificed for the qualities of strength and 
cunning and speed, as these alone have survival 
value. Man wants specific results at once. Na- 
ture works slowly to general results. Her army is 
drilled only in battle. Her tools grow sharper in 
the using. The strength of her species is the 
strength of the obstacles they overcome. 

What is called Darwinism is entirely an anthro- 
pomorphic view of Nature — Nature humanized 
and doing as man does. What is called Natural 
Selection is man's selection read into animate 
nature. We see in nature what we have to call 
185 



THE LAST HARVEST 

intelligence — the adaptation of means to ends. 
We see purpose in all living things, but not in the 
same sense in non-living things. The purpose is 
not in the light, but in the eye; in the ear, but 
not in the sound ; in the lungs, and not in the air ; 
in the stomach, and not in the food ; in the various 
organs of the body, and not in the forces that sur- 
round and act upon it. We cannot say that the 
purpose of the clouds is to bring rain, or of the sun 
to give light and warmth, in the sense that we can 
say it is the purpose of the eyelid to protect the 
eye, of the teeth to masticate the food, or of the 
varnish upon the leaves to protect the leaves. 

The world was not made for us, but we are here 
because the world was made as it is. We are the 
secondary fact and not the primary. Nature is 
non-human, non-moral, non-religious, non-scien- 
tific, though it is from her that we get our ideas of 
all these things. All parts and organs of living 
bodies have, or have had, a purpose. Nature is 
blind, but she knows what she wants and she gets 
it. She is blind, I say, because she is all eyes, and 
sees through the buds of her trees and the rootlets 
of her plants as well as by the optic nerves in her 
animals. And, though I believe that the accumu- 
lation of variations is the key to new species, yet 
this accumulation is not based upon outward utility 
but upon an innate tendency to development — 
the push of life, or creative evolution, as Bergson 
186 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

names it; not primarily because the variations 
are advantages, but because the formation of a 
new species is such a slow process, stretches over 
such a period of geologic time, that the slight 
variations from generation to generation could 
have no survival value. The primary factor is 
the inherent tendency to development. The ori- 
gin of species is on a scale of time of enormous 
magnitude. What takes place among our domes- 
tic animals of a summer day is by no means a safe 
guide as to what befell their ancestors in the abysses 
of geologic time. It is true that Nature may be 
read in the little as well as in the big, — Natura 
in minimis existed, — in the gnat as well as in the 
elephant; but she cannot be read in our yearly 
calendars as she can in the calendars of the geologic 
strata. Species go out and species come in; the 
book of natural revelation opens and closes at 
chance places, and rarely do we get a continuous 
record — in no other case more clearly than in that 
of the horse. 

The horse was a horse, from the first five-toed 
animal in Eocene times, millions of years ago, 
through all the intermediate forms of four-toed and 
three-toed, down to the one-toed superb creature 
of our own day. Amid all the hazards and delays 
of that vast stretch of time, one may say, the horse- 
impulse never faltered. The survival value of 
the slight gains in size and strength from millennium 
187 



THE LAST HARVEST 

to millennium could have played no part. It was 
the indwelling necessity toward development that 
determined the issue. This assertion does not 
deliver us into the hands of teleology, but is based 
upon the idea that ontogeny and phylogeny are 
under the same law of growth. In the little eohip- 
pus was potentially the horse we know, as surely 
as the oak is potential in the acorn, or the bird 
potential in the egg y whatever element of mystery 
may enter into the problem. 

In fields where speed wins, the fleetest are the 
fittest. In fields where strength wins, the strongest 
are the fittest. In fields where sense-acuteness 
wins, the keenest of eye, ears, and nose are the 
fittest. 

When we come to the race of man, the fittest to 
survive, from our moral and intellectual point of 
view, is not always the best. The lower orders of 
humanity are usually better fitted to survive than 
the higher orders — they are much more prolific 
and adaptive. The tares are better fitted to sur- 
vive than the wheat. Every man's hand is against 
the weeds, and every man's hand gives a lift to the 
corn and the wheat, but the weeds do not fail. 
There is nothing like original sin to keep a man or 
a plant going. Emerson's gardener was probably 
better fitted to survive than Emerson; Newton's 
butler than Newton himself. 

Most naturalists will side with Darwin in re- 
188 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

jecting the idea of Asa Gray, that the stream of 
variation has been guided by a higher power, unless 
they think of the will of this power as inherent in 
every molecule of matter ; but guidance in the usual 
theological sense is not to be thought of ; the princi- 
ple of guidance cannot be separated from the thing 
guided. It recalls a parable of Charles Kingsley's 
which he related to Huxley. A heathen khan in 
Tartary was visited by a pair of proselytizing mool- 
lahs. The first moollah said, " Khan, worship my 
god. He is so wise that he made all things ! " 
Moollah Number Two said, " O Khan, worship my 
god. He is so wise that he makes all things make 
themselves ! " Number Two won the day. 

IV 

How often it turns out that a man's minor works 
outlive his major ! This is true in both literature 
and science, but more often in the former than in 
the latter. Darwin furnishes a case in the field 
of science. He evidently looked upon his " Origin 
of Species " as his great contribution to biological 
science ; but it is highly probable that his " Voy- 
age of the Beagle " will outlast all his other books. 
The " Voyage " is of perennial interest and finds 
new readers in each generation. I find myself re- 
reading it every eight or ten years. I have lately 
read it for the fourth time. It is not an argument 
or a polemic ; it is a personal narrative of a disin- 
189 



THE LAST HARVEST 

terested yet keen observer, and is always fresh and 
satisfying. For the first time we see a compara- 
tively unknown country like South America through 
the eyes of a born and trained naturalist. It is 
the one book of his that makes a wide appeal and 
touches life and nature the most closely. 

We may say that Darwin was a Darwinian from 
the first, — a naturalist and a philosopher com- 
bined, — and was predisposed to look at animate 
nature in the way his works have since made us 
familiar with. 

In his trip on the Beagle he saw from the start 
with the eyes of a born evolutionist. In South 
America he saw the fossil remains of the Toxodon, 
and observed, " How wonderful are the different 
orders, at the present time so well separated, blended 
together in the different points of the structure 
of the Toxodon ! " All forms of life attracted 
him. He looked into the brine-pans of Lymington 
and found that water with one quarter of a pound 
of salt to the pint was inhabited, and he was led to 
say : " Well may we affirm that every part of the 
world is habitable ! Whether lakes of brine or 
those subterranean ones hidden beneath volcanic 
mountains, — warm mineral springs, — the wide 
expanse and depth of the ocean, — the upper regions 
of the atmosphere, and even the surface of per- 
petual snow, — all support organic beings." 

He studies the parasitical habit of the cuckoo 
190 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

and hits on an explanation of it. He speculates 
why the partridges and deer in South America 
are so tame. 

His " Voyage of the Beagle " alone would insure 
him lasting fame. It is a classic among scientific 
books of travel. Here is a traveler of a new kind : 
a natural-history voyager, a man bent on seeing 
and taking note of everything going on in nature 
about him, in the non-human, as well as in the 
human world. The minuteness of his observation 
and the significance of its subject-matter are a 
lesson to all observers. Darwin's interests are so 
varied and genuine. One sees in this volume the 
seed-bed of much of his subsequent work. He 
was quite a young man (twenty-four) when he 
made this voyage; he was ill more than half the 
time; he was as yet only an observer and appre- 
ciator of Nature, quite free from any theories about 
her ways and methods. He says that this was by 
far the most important event of his life and deter- 
mined his whole career. His theory of descent 
was already latent in his mind, as is evinced by an 
observation he made about the relationship in 
South America between the extinct and the liv- 
ing forms. " This relationship," he said, " will, 
I do not doubt, hereafter throw more light on the 
appearance of organic beings on our earth, and 
their disappearance from it, than any other class 
of facts." 

191 



THE LAST HARVEST 

He looked into the muddy waters of the sea off 
the coast of Chile, and found a curious new form of 
minute life — microscopic animals that exploded 
as they swam through the water. In South Amer- 
ica he saw an intimate relationship between the 
extinct species of ant-eaters, armadillos, tapirs, 
peccaries, guanacos, opossums, and so on, and the 
living species of these animals; and he adds that 
the wonderful relationship in the same continent 
between the dead and the living would doubtless 
hereafter throw more light on the appearance of 
organic beings on our earth, and their disappear- 
ance from it, than any other class of facts. 

His observation of the evidences of the rise and 
fall of thousands of feet of the earth along the 
Cordilleras leads him to make this rather startling 
statement : " Daily it is forced home on the mind 
of the geologist that nothing, not even the wind 
that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust 
of the earth." 

There is now and then a twinkle of humor in 
Darwin's eyes, as when he says that in the high 
altitude of the Andes the inhabitants recommend 
onions for the " puna," or shortness of breath, 
but that he found nothing so good as fossil shells. 

Water boils at such a low temperature in the 

high Andes that potatoes will not cook if boiled all 

night. Darwin heard his guides discussing the 

cause. " They had come to the simple conclusion 

192 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

that ' the cursed pot ' (which was a new one) did 
not choose to boil potatoes." 

In all Darwin's record we see that the book of 
nature, which ordinary travelers barely glance at, 
he opened and carefully perused. 

V 

Natural Selection turns out to be of only sec- 
ondary importance. It is not creative, but only 
confirmative. It is a weeding-out process; it is 
Nature's way of improving the stock. Its tend- 
ency is to make species more and more hardy 
and virile. The weak and insufficiently endowed 
among all forms tend to drop out. Life to all 
creatures is more or less a struggle, a struggle with 
the environment, with the inorganic forces, — 
storm, heat, cold, sterile land, and engulfing floods, — 
and it is a struggle with competing forms for food 
and shelter and a place in the sun. The strongest, 
the most amply endowed with what we call vitality 
or power to live, win. Species have come to be 
what they are through this process. Immunity 
from disease comes through this fight for life ; and 
adaptability — through trial and struggle species 
adapt themselves, as do our own bodies, to new 
and severe conditions. The naturally weak fall 
by the wayside as in an army on a forced march. 

Every creature becomes the stronger by the 
opposition it overcomes. Natural Selection gives 
193 



THE LAST HARVEST 

speed, where speed is the condition of safety, 
strength where strength is the condition, keenness 
and quickness of sense-perception where these are 
demanded. Natural Selection works upon these 
attributes and tends to perfect them. Any group 
of men or beasts or birds brought under any un- 
usual strain from cold, hunger, labor, effort, will 
undergo a weeding-out process. Populate the land 
with more animal life than it can support, or with 
more vegetable forms than it can sustain, and a 
weeding-out process will begin. A fuller measure 
of vitality, or a certain hardiness and toughness, 
will enable some species to hold on longer than 
others, and, maybe, keep up the fight till the strug- 
gle lessens and victory is won. 

The flame of life is easily blown out in certain 
forms, and is very tenacious in others. How un- 
equally the power to resist cold, for instance, 
seems to be distributed among plants and trees, 
and probably among animals ! One spring an un- 
seasonable cold snap in May (mercury 28) killed 
or withered about one per cent of the leaves on the 
lilacs, and one tenth of one per cent of the leaves 
of our crab-apple tree. In the woods around 
Slabsides I observed that nearly half the plants of 
Solomon's-seal (Polygonatum) and false Solomon's- 
seal (Smilacina) were withered. The vital power, 
the power to live, seems stronger in some plants 
than in others of the same kind. I suppose this 
194 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

law holds throughout animate nature. When a 
strain of any kind comes, these weaker ones drop 
out. In reading the stories of Arctic explorers, I 
see this process going on among their dog-teams : 
some have greater power of endurance than others. 
A few are constantly dropping out or falling by 
the wayside. With an army on a forced march 
the same thing happens. In the struggle for ex- 
istence the weak go to the wall. Of course the 
struggle among animals is at least a toughening 
process. It seems as if the old Indian legend, that 
the strength of the foe overcome passes into the 
victor, were true. But how a new species could 
arrive as the result of such struggle is past rinding 
out. Variation with all forms of life is more or less 
constant, but it is around a given mean. Only 
those acquired characters are transmitted that 
arise from the needs of the organism. 

A vast number of changes in plants and animals 
are superficial and in no way vital. It is hard to 
find two leaves of the same tree that will exactly 
coincide in all their details; but a difference that 
was in some way a decided advantage would tend 
to be inherited and passed along. It is said that 
the rabbits in Australia have developed a longer 
and stronger nail on the first toe of each front foot, 
which aids them in climbing over the wire fences. 
The aye-aye has a specially adapted finger for 
extracting insects from their hiding-places. Un- 
195 



THE LAST HARVEST 

doubtedly such things are inherited. The snow- 
shoes of the partridge and rabbit are inherited. 
The needs of the organism influence structure. 
The spines in the quills in the tails of woodpeckers, 
and in the brown creeper, are other cases in point. 
The nuthatch has no spines on its tail, because it 
can move in all directions, as well with head down 
as with head up. I have read of a serpent some- 
where that feeds upon eggs. As the serpent has 
no lips or distendable cheeks, and as its mechan- 
ism of deglutition acts very slowly, an egg crushed 
in the mouth would be mostly spilled. So the 
eggs are swallowed whole ; but in the throat they 
come in contact with sharp tooth-like spines, which 
are not teeth, but downward projections from the 
backbone, and which serve to break the shells of 
the eggs. Radical or vital variations are rare, and 
we do not witness them any more than we witness 
the birth of a new species. And that is all there 
is to Natural Selection. It is a name for a proc- 
ess of elimination which is constantly going on in 
animate nature all about us. It is in no sense 
creative, it originates nothing, but clinches and 
toughens existing forms. 

The mutation theory of De Vries is a much more 
convincing theory of the origin of species than is 
Darwin's Natural Selection. If things would only 
mutate a little of tener ! But they seem very reluc- 
tant to do so. There does seem to have been some 
196 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

mutation among plants, — De Vries has discovered 
several such, — but in animal life where are the 
mutants ? When or where has a new species orig- 
inated in this way? Surely not during the his- 
toric period. 

Fluctuations are in all directions around a center 
— the mean is always returned to ; but mutations, 
or the progressive steps in evolution, are diver- 
gent lines away from the center. Fluctuations 
are superficial and of little significance; but mu- 
tations, if they occur, involve deep-seated, funda- 
mental factors, factors more or less responsive to 
the environment, but not called into being by it. 
Of the four factors in the Darwinian formula, — 
variation, heredity, the struggle, and natural se- 
lection, — variation is the most negligible ; it 
furnishes an insufficient handle for selection to 
take hold of. Something more radical must lead 
the way to new species. 

As applied to species, the fittest to survive is a 
misleading term. All are fit to survive from the 
fact that they do survive. In a world where, as a 
rule, the race is to the swift and the battle to the 
strong, the slow and the frail also survive because 
they do not come in competition with the swift 
and the strong. Nature mothers all, and assigns 
to each its sphere. 

The Darwinians are hostile to Lamarck with 
his inner developing and perfecting principle, and, 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

by the same token, to Aristotle, who is the father 
of the theory. They regard organic evolution as 
a purely mechanical process. 

Variation can work only upon a variable tend- 
ency — an inherent impulse to development. A 
rock, a hill, a stream, may change, but it is not 
variable in the biological sense : it can never be- 
come anything but a rock, a hill, a stream ; but a 
flower, an egg, a seed, a plant, a baby, can. What 
I mean to say is that there must be the primordial 
tendency to development which Natural Selection 
is powerless to beget, and which it can only speed 
up or augment. It cannot give the wing to the 
seed, or the spring, or the hook ; or the feather to 
the bird ; or the scale to the fish ; but it can perfect 
all these things. The fittest of its kind does stand 
the best chance to survive. 

VI 

After we have Darwin shorn of his selection 
theories, what has he left? His significance is 
not lessened. He is still the most impressive 
figure in modern biological science. His attitude 
of mind, the problems he tackled, his methods of 
work, the nature and scope of his inquiries, together 
with his candor, and his simplicity and devotion to 
truth, are a precious heritage to all mankind. 

Darwin's work is monumental because he be- 
longs to the class of monumental men. The doc- 
198 



A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN 

trine of evolution as applied to animate nature 
reached its complete evolution in his mind. He 
stated the theory in broader and fuller terms than 
had any man before him; he made it cover the 
whole stupendous course of evolution. He showed 
man once for all an integral part of the zoologic 
system. He elevated natural history, or biology, 
to the ranks of the great sciences, a worthy member 
of the triumvirate — astronomy, geology, biology. 
He taught us how to cross-question the very gods 
of life in their council chambers; he showed us 
what significance attaches to the simplest facts of 
natural history. 

Darwin impresses by his personality not less 
than by his logic and his vast storehouse of obser- 
vations. He was a great man before he was a 
great natural-history philosopher. His patient 
and painstaking observation is a lesson to all na- 
ture students. The minutest facts engaged him. 
He studies the difference between the stamens of the 
same plant. He counted nine thousand seeds, one 
by one, from artificially fertilized pods. Plants from 
two pollens, he says, grow at different rates. Any 
difference in the position of the pistil, or in the size 
and color of the stamens, in individuals of the same 
species grown together, was of keen interest to him. 

The best thing about Darwinism is Darwin — 
his candor, his patience, his simplicity, his devo- 
tion to truth, and his power of observation. This 
199 



THE LAST HARVEST 

is about what Professor T. H. Morgan meant when 
he said : " It is the spirit of Darwinism, not its 
formulae, that we proclaim as our best heritage." 
He gave us a new point of view of the drama of 
creation; he gave us ideas that are applicable to 
the whole domain of human activities. It is true, 
he was not a pioneer in this field : he did not blaze 
the first trail through this wilderness of biological 
facts and records; rather was he like a master- 
engineer who surveys and establishes the great 
highway. All the world now travels along the 
course he established and perfected. He made the 
long road of evolution easy, and he placed upon 
permanent foundations the doctrine of the animal 
origin of man. He taught the world to think in 
terms of evolution, and he pointed the way to a 
rational explanation of the diversity of living forms. 



200 



WHAT MAKES A POEM? 

Pope said that a middling poet was no poet at all. 
Middling things in art or in any field of human 
endeavor do not arouse our enthusiasm, and it is 
enthusiasm that fans the fires of life. There are 
all degrees of excellence, but in poetry one is always 
looking for the best. Pope himself holds a place 
in English literature which he could not hold had 
he been only a middling poet. He is not a poet of 
the highest order certainly, but a poet of the third 
or fourth order — the poet of the reason, the un- 
derstanding, but not of the creative imagination. 
It is wit and not soul that keeps Pope alive. 

Nearly every age and land has plenty of mid- 
dling poets. Probably there were never more of 
them in the land than there are to-day. Scores of 
volumes of middling verse are issued from the press 
every week. The magazines all have middling 
verse; only at rare intervals do they have some- 
thing more. The May " Atlantic," for instance, 
had a poem by a (to me) comparatively new writer, 
Olive Tilford Dargan, that one would hardly stig- 
matize as middling poetry. Let the reader judge 
201 



THE LAST HARVEST 

for himself. It is called " Spring in the Study." 
I quote only the second part : 

"What is this sudden gayety that shakes the grayest boughs? 
A voice is calling fieldward — 'T is time to start the ploughs ! 
To set the furrows rolling, while all the old crows nod ; , 
And deep as life, the kernel, to cut the golden sod. 
The pen — let nations have it ; — we '11 plough a while for God. 

"When half the things that must be done are greater than our 

art, 
And half the things that must be done are smaller than our 

heart, 
And poorest gifts are dear to burn on altars unrevealed, 
Like music comes the summons, the challenge from the weald ! 
'They tread immortal measures who make a mellow field!' 

"The planet's rather pleasant, alluring in its way; 

But let the ploughs be idle and none of us can stay. 

Here 's where there is no doubting, no ghosts uncertain stalk, 

A-traveling with the plough beam, beneath the sailing hawk, 

Cutting the furrow deep and true where Destiny will walk." 

Lafcadio Hearn spoke with deep truth when he 
said that " the measure of a poet is the largeness 
of thought which he can bring to any subject, how- 
ever trifling." Certainly Mrs. Dargan brings 
this largeness of thought to her subject. Has the 
significance of the plough ever before been so 
brought out ? She makes one feel that there should 
be a plough among the constellations. What are 
the chairs and harps and dippers in comparison ? 

The poetry of mere talent is always middling 

poetry — " poems distilled from other poems," 

as Whitman says. The work of a genius is of a 

different order. Most current verse is merely 

202 



WHAT MAKES A POEM? 

sweetened prose put up in verse form. It serves 
its purpose; the mass of readers like it. Nearly- 
all educated persons can turn it off with little effort. 
I have done my share of it myself — rhymed 
natural history, but not poetry. " Waiting " is 
my nearest approach to a true poem. 

Wordsworth quotes Aristotle as saying that 
poetry is the most philosophical of all writing, 
and Wordsworth agrees with him. There cer- 
tainly can be no great poetry without a great phi- 
losopher behind it — a man who has thought and 
felt profoundly upon nature and upon life, as 
Wordsworth himself surely had. The true poet, 
like the philosopher, is a searcher after truth, and 
a searcher at the very heart of things — not cold, 
objective truth, but truth which is its own testi- 
mony, and which is carried alive into the heart by 
passion. He seeks more than beauty, he seeks the 
perennial source of beauty. The poet leads man 
to nature as a mother leads her child there — to 
instill a love of it into his heart. If a poet adds 
neither to my knowledge nor to my love, of what 
use is he? For instance, Poe does not make me 
know more or love more, but he delights me by his 
consummate art. Bryant's long poem " The Ages " 
has little value, mainly because it is charged with 
no philosophy, and no imaginative emotion. His 
"Lines to a Waterfowl" will last because of the 
simple, profound human emotion they awaken. 
203 



THE LAST HARVEST 

The poem is marred, however, by the stanza that 
he tacks on the end, which strikes a note entirely 
foreign to the true spirit of the poem. You cannot 
by tacking a moral to a poem give it the philo- 
sophical breadth to which I have referred. " Than- 
atopsis " has a solemn and majestic music, but 
not the unique excellence of the waterfowl poem. 
Yet it may be generally said of Bryant that he 
has a broad human outlook on life and is free from 
the subtleties and ingenious refinements of many 
of our younger poets. 

I know of only three poets in this century who 
bring a large measure of thought and emotion to 
their task. I refer to William Vaughn Moody, to 
John Russell McCarthy (author of " Out-of -Doors " 
and " Gods and Devils "), and to Robert Loveman, 
best known for his felicitous " Rain Song," a 
poem too well known to be quoted here. Any 
poet who has ever lived might have been proud to 
have written that poem. It goes, as lightly as 
thistle-down, yet is freighted with thought. Its 
philosophy is so sublimated and so natural and 
easy that we are likely to forget that it has any 
philosophy at all. The fifty or more stanzas of his 
" Gates of Silence " are probably far less well 
known. Let me quote a few of them : 

"The races rise and fall, 

The nations come and go, 
Time tenderly doth cover all 
With violets and snow. 

204 



WHAT MAKES A POEM? 

"The mortal tide moves on 
To some immortal shore, 
Past purple peaks of dusk and dawn. 
Into the evermore. 



'All the tomes of all the tribes, 
All the songs of all the scribes, 
All that priest and prophet say, 
What is it ? and what are they ? 

'Fancies futile, feeble, vain, 
Idle dream-drift of the brain, - 
As of old the mystery 
Doth encompass you and me. 



" Old and yet young, the jocund Earth 
Doth speed among the spheres, 
Her children of imperial birth 
Are all the golden years. 

"The happy orb sweeps on, 
Led by some vague unrest, 
Some mystic hint of joys unborn 
Springing within her breast." 

What takes one in " The Gates of Silence,*' 
which, of course, means the gates of death, 
are the large, sweeping views. The poet strides 
through time and space like a Colossus and 

"flings 
Out of his spendthrift hands 
The whirling worlds like pebbles, 
The mesh&d stars like sands." 

Loveman's stanzas have not the flexibility and 
freedom of those of Moody and McCarthy, but 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

they bring in full measure the largeness of thought 
which a true poem requires. 

Some of Moody's poems rank with the best in 
the literature of his time. He was deeply moved 
by the part we played in the Spanish-American 
War. It was a war of shame and plunder from 
the point of view of many of the noblest and most 
patriotic men of the country. We freed Cuba from 
the Spanish yoke and left her free; but we seized 
the Philippines and subdued the native popula- 
tion by killing a vast number of them — more 
than half of them, some say. Commercial ex- 
ploitation inspired our policy. How eloquently 
Senator Hoar of Massachusetts inveighed against 
our course ! We promised the Filipinos their 
freedom — a promise we have not yet fulfilled. 

Moody's most notable poems are " Gloucester 
Moors," "An Ode in Time of Hesitation " 
(inspired by the Shaw Monument in Boston, the 
work of Saint-Gaudens), "The Brute," "The 
Daguerreotype," and " On a Soldier Fallen in the 
Philippines." In this last poem throb and surge 
the mingled emotions of pride and shame which 
the best minds in the country felt at the time — 
shame at our mercenary course, and pride in the 
fine behavior of our soldiers. It is true we made 
some pretense of indemnifying Spain by paying 
her twenty million dollars, which was much like 
the course of a boy who throws another boy 
206 



WHAT MAKES A POEM? 

down and forcibly takes his jack-knife from 
him, then gives him a few coppers to salve 
his wounds. I remember giving Moody's poem 
to Charles Eliot Norton (one of those who opposed 
the war), shortly after it appeared. He read it 
aloud with marked emotion. Let me quote two 
of its stanzas : 

"Toll ! Let the great bells toll 
Till the clashing air is dim. 
Did we wrong this parted soul ? 
We will make it up to him. 
Toll ! Let him never guess 
What work we set him to. 
Laurel, laurel, yes; 
He did what we bade him do. 
Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was 

good; 
Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country's 
own heart's-blood. 

"A flag for the soldier's bier 
Who dies that his land may live; 
O, banners, banners here, 
That he doubt not nor misgive ! 
That he heed not from the tomb 
The evil days draw near 
When the nation, robed in gloom, 
With its faithless past shall strive. 
Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide of its 

island mark, 
Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and 
sinned in the dark." 

When I say that every true poet must have a 
philosophy, I do not mean that he must be what 
is commonly called a philosophical poet; from 
207 



THE LAST HARVEST 

such we steer clear. The philosophy in a poem 
must be like the iron in the blood. It is the iron 
that gives color and vigor to the blood. Reduce 
it and we become an anaemic and feeble race. 
Much of the popular poetry is anaemic in this re- 
spect. There is no virile thought in it. All of 
which amounts to saying that there is always a 
great nature back of a great poem. 

The various forms of verse are skillfully used by 
an increasing number of educated persons, but 
the number of true poets is not increasing. Quite 
the contrary, I fear. The spirit of the times in 
which we live does not favor meditation and ab- 
sorption in the basic things out of which great 
poetry arises. " The world is too much with 
us." Yet we need not be too much discour- 
aged. England has produced Masefield, and we 
have produced John Russell McCarthy, who has 
written the best nature poetry since Emerson. 
The genius of a race does not repeat. We shall 
never again produce poets of the type of those that 
are gone, and we should not want to. All we may 
hope for is to produce poets as original and char- 
acteristic and genuine as those of the past — poets 
who as truly express the spirit of their time, as the 
greater poets did of theirs — not Emerson and 
Whitman over again, but a wide departure from 
their types. 

Speaking of Whitman, may we not affirm that 
208 



WHAT MAKES A POEM? 

it is his tremendous and impassioned philosophy 
suffusing his work, as the blood suffuses the body, 
that keeps " Leaves of Grass " forever fresh ? We 
do not go to Whitman for pretty flowers of poesy, 
although they are there, but we go to him for his 
attitude toward life and the universe, we go to 
stimulate and fortify our souls — in short, for his 
cosmic philosophy incarnated in a man. 

What largeness of thought Tennyson brings to 
all his themes ! There is plenty of iron in his blood, 
though it be the blood of generations of culture, 
and of an overripe civilization. We cannot say 
as much of Swinburne's poetry or prose. I do 
not think either will live. Bigness of words, and 
fluency, and copiousness of verse cannot make up 
for the want of a sane and rational philosophy. 
Arnold's poems always have real and tangible 
subject matter. His " Dover Beach " is a great 
stroke of poetic genius. Let me return to Poe : 
what largeness of thought did he bring to his sub- 
jects ? Emerson spoke of him as " the jingle 
man," and Poe, in turn, spoke of Emerson with 
undisguised contempt. Poe's picture indicates a 
neurotic person. There is power in his eyes, but the 
shape of his head is abnormal, and a profound mel- 
ancholy seems to rest on his very soul. What a 
conjurer he was with words and meters and meas- 
ures ! No substance at all in his " Raven," only 
shadows — a wonderful dance of shadows, all 
209 



THE LAST HARVEST 

tricks of a verbal wizard. " The Bells," a really 
powerful poem, is his masterpiece, unique in Eng- 
lish literature ; but it has no intellectual content. 
Its appeal is to the eye and ear alone. It has a 
verbal splendor and a mastery over measure and 
rhythm far beyond anything in Shelley, or in any 
other poet of his time. It is art glorified ; it is full 
of poetic energy. No wonder foreign critics see 
in Poe something far beyond that found in any 
other American, or in any British poet ! 

Poe set to work to write " The Raven " as de- 
liberately as a mechanic goes to work to make a 
machine, or an architect to build a house. It was 
all a matter of calculation with him. He did not 
believe in long poems, hence decided at the outset 
that his poem should not be more than one hun- 
dred lines in length. Then he asked himself, 
What is the legitimate end and aim of a poem ? and 
answered emphatically, Beauty. The next point 
to settle was, What impression must be made to 
produce that effect ? He decided that " melan- 
choly is the most legitimate of all poetic tones." 
Why joy or gladness, like that of the birds, is not 
equally legitimate, he does not explain. Then, to 
give artistic piquancy to the whole, he decided that 
there must be " some pivot upon which the whole 
structure might turn." He found that " no one 
had been so universally employed as the refrain." 
The burden of the poem should be given by the 
210 



WHAT MAXES A POEM? 

refrain, and it should be a monotone, and should 
have brevity. Then his task was to select a single 
word that would be in keeping with the melancholy 
at which he was aiming, and this he found in the 
word nevermore. He next invented a pretext for 
the frequent but varying use of nevermore. This 
word could not be spoken in the right tone by a 
human being; it must come from an unreasoning 
creature, hence the introduction of the raven, an 
ill-omened bird, in harmony with the main tone 
of the poem. He then considered what was the 
most melancholy subject of mankind, and found 
it was death, and that that melancholy theme was 
most poetical when allied to beauty. Hence the 
death of a beautiful woman was unquestionably 
the most poetic topic in the world. It was equally 
beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such 
topic were those of a bereaved lover. Thus he 
worked himself up, or rather back, to the climax 
of the poem, for he wrote the last stanza, in which 
the climax occurs, first. His own analysis of the 
poem is like a chemist's analysis of some new com- 
pound he has produced; it is full of technical 
terms and subtle distinctions. Probably no other 
famous poem was turned out in just that studied 
and deliberate architectural way — no pretense of 
inspiration, or of " eyes in fine frenzy rolling " : 
just skilled craftsmanship — only this and nothing 
more. 

211 



THE LAST HARVEST 

Arnold's dictum that poetry is a criticism of life 
is, in a large and flexible sense, true. The poet does 
not criticize life as the conscious critic does, but as 
we unconsciously do in our most exalted moments. 
Arnold, I believe, did not appreciate Whitman, 
but one function of the poet upon which Whitman 
lays emphasis, is criticism of his country and times. 

"What is this you bring, my America? 
Is it uniform with my country? 

Is it not something that has been better done or told before? 
Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship ? 
Is it not a mere tale ? a rhyme ? a pettiness ? — is the good old 

cause in it ? 
Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians, 

literates of enemies, lands ? 
Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here ? 
Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners? 
Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside? 
Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in 

my strength, gait, face ? 
Have real employments contributed to it? 
Original makers, not mere amanuenses ? " 

Speaking of criticism, it occurs to me how im- 
portant it is that a poet, or any other writer, should 
be a critic of himself. Wordsworth, who was a 
really great poet, was great only at rare intervals. 
His habitual mood was dull and prosy. His sin 
was that he kept on writing during those moods, 
grinding out sonnets by the hundred — one hun- 
dred and thirty-two ecclesiastical sonnets, and 
over half as many on liberty, all very dull and 
wooden. His mill kept on grinding whether it had 
212 



WHAT MAKES A POEM? 

any grist of the gods to grind or not. He told 
Emerson he was never in haste to publish, but he 
seems to have been in haste to write, and wrote on 
all occasions, producing much dull and trivial 
work. We speak of a man's work as being heavy. 
Let us apply the test literally to Wordsworth and 
weigh his verse. The complete edition of his 
poems, edited by Henry Reed and published in 
Philadelphia in 1851, weighs fifty-five ounces; 
the selection which Matthew Arnold made from 
his complete works, and which is supposed to con- 
tain all that is worth preserving, weighs ten 
ounces. The difference represents the dead wood. 
That Wordsworth was a poor judge of his own work 
is seen in the remark he made to Emerson that he 
did not regard his " Tintern Abbey " as highly as 
some of the sonnets and parts of " The Excursion. " 
I believe the Abbey poem is the one by which he 
will longest be remembered. " The Excursion " 
is a long, dull sermon. Its didacticism lies so 
heavily upon it that it has nearly crushed its po- 
etry — like a stone on a flower. 

All poetry is true, but all truth is not poetry. 
When Burns treats a natural-history theme, as in 
his verses on the mouse and the daisy, and even on 
the louse, how much more there is in them than 
mere natural history ! With what a broad and 
tender philosophy he clothes them ! how he iden- 
tifies himself with the mouse and regards himself 
213 



THE LAST HARVEST 

as its fellow mortal ! So have Emerson's " Tit- 
mouse " and " Humble-Bee " a better excuse for 
being than their natural history. So have Mc- 
Carthy's "For a Bunny" and "The Snake," 
and " To a Worm." 

THE SNAKE 

Poor unpardonable length, 
All belly to the mouth, 
Writhe then and wriggle, 
If there's joy in it ! 

My heel, at least, shall spare you. 

A little sun on a stone, 

A mouse or two, 

And all that unreasonable belly 

Is happy. 

No wonder God wasn't satisfied — 
And went on creating. 

TO A WORM 

Do you know you are green, little worm, 

Like the leaf you feed on? 

Perhaps it is on account of the birds, who would like to eat you. 

But is there any reason why they shouldn't eat you, little worm ? 

Do you know you are comical, little worm? 
How you double yourself up and wave your head, 
And then stretch out and double up again, 
All after a little food. 

Do you know you have a long, strange name, little worm ? 

I will not tell you what it is. 

That is for men of learning. 

You — and God — do not care about such things. 

214 



WHAT MAKES A POEM? 

You would wave about and double up just as much, and be 

just as futile, with it as without it. 
Why do you crawl about on the top of that post, little worm ? 
It should have been a tree, eh ? with green leaves for eating. 
But it isn't, and you have crawled about it all day, looking for 

a new brown branch, or a green leaf. 
Do you know anything about tears, little worm ? 

Or take McCarthy's lines to the honey bee : 

"Poor desolate betrayer of Pan's trust, 
Who turned from mating and the sweets thereof. 
To make of labor an eternal lust, 
And with pale thrift destroy the red of love, 
The curse of Pan has sworn your destiny. 
Unloving, unbeloved, you go your way 
Toiling forever, and unwittingly 
You bear love's precious burden every day 
From flower to flower (for your blasphemy), 
Poor eunuch, making flower lovers gay. " 

Or this : 

GODLINESS 

I know a man who says 

That he gets godliness out of a book. 

He told me this as we sought arbutus 

On the April hills — 

Little color-poems of God 

Lilted to us from the ground, 

Lyric blues and whites and pinks. 

We climbed great rocks, 

Eternally chanting their gray elegies, 

And all about, the cadenced hills 

Were proud 

With the stately green epic of the Almighty. 

And then we walked home under the stars, 
While he kept telling me about his book 
And the godliness in it. 

215 



THE LAST HARVEST 

There are many great lyrics in our literature 
which have no palpable or deducible philosophy; 
but they are the utterance of deep, serious, imagi- 
native natures, and they reach our minds and 
hearts. Wordsworth's " Daffodils," his " Cuckoo," 
his " Skylark," and scores of others, live because 
they have the freshness and spontaneity of birds 
and flowers themselves. 

Such a poem as Gray's " Elegy " holds its own, 
and will continue to hold it, because it puts in 
pleasing verse form the universal human emotion 
which all persons feel more or less when gazing 
upon graves. 

The intellectual content of Scott's poems is not 
great but the human and emotional content in 
them is great. A great minstrel of the border 
speaks in them. The best that Emerson could 
say of Scott was that " he is the delight of generous 
boys," but the spirit of romance offers as legiti- 
mate a field for the poet as does the spirit of tran- 
scendentalism, though yielding, of course, different 
human values. 

Every poet of a high order has a deep moral na- 
ture, and yet the poet is far from being a mere 
moralist — 

"A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, 
An intellectual ail-in-all." 

Every true poem is an offering upon the altar 
of art ; it exists to no other end ; it teaches as nature 
216 



WHAT MAKES A POEM? 

teaches ; it is good as nature is good ; its art is the 
art of nature ; it brings our spirits in closer and more 
loving contact with the universe; it is for the 
edification of the soul. 



217 



VI 

SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS 

THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT 

The clouds are transient, but the sky is permanent. 
The petals of a flowering plant are transient, the 
leaves and fruit are less so, and the roots the least 
transient of all. The dew on the grass is tran- 
sient, as is the frost of an autumn morning. The 
snows and the rains abide longer. The splendors 
of summer and sunrise and sunset soon pass, but 
the glory of the day lasts. The rainbow vanishes 
in a few moments, but the prismatic effect of the 
drops of rain is a law of optics. Colors fade while 
texture is unimpaired. 

Of course change marks everything, living or 
dead. Even the pole star in astronomic time 
will vanish. But consider things mundane only. 
How the rocks on the seacoast seem to defy and 
withstand the waves that beat against them ! 
" Weak as is a breaking wave " is a line of Words- 
worth's. Yet the waves remain after the rocks 
are gone. The sea knows no change as the land 
does. It and the sky are the two unchanging 
earth features. 

218 



SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS 

In our own lives how transient are our moments 
of inspiration, our morning joy, our ecstasies of 
the spirit ! Upon how much in the world of art, 
literature, invention, modes, may be written the 
word " perishable " ! ** All flesh is grass," says 
the old Book. Individuals, species, races, pass. 
Life alone remains and is immortal. 

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE 

Positive and negative go hand in hand through 
the world. Victory and defeat, hope and despair, 
pleasure and pain. Man is positive, woman is 
negative in comparison. The day is positive, the 
night is negative. But it is a pleasure to remem- 
ber that it is always day in the universe. 

The shadow of the earth does not extend 
very far, nor the shadow of any other planet. 
Day is the great cosmic fact. The masses of men 
are negative to the few master and compelling 
minds. Cold is negative, heat is positive, though 
the difference is only one of degree. The negative 
side of life, the side of meditation, reflection, and 
reverie, is no less important than the side of action 
and performance. Youth is positive, age is nega- 
tive. Age says No where it used to say Yes. It 
takes in sail. Life's hurry and heat are over, the 
judgment is calm, the passions subdued, the stress 
of effort relaxed. Our temper is less aggressive, 
events seem less imminent. 
219 



THE LAST HARVEST 

The morning is positive ; in the evening we muse 
and dream and take our ease, we see our friends, we 
unstring the bow, we indulge our social instincts. 

Optimism is positive, pessimism is negative. 
Fear, suspicion, distrust — are all negative. 

On the seashore where I write * I see the ebbing 
tide, the exposed sand and rocks, the receding 
waves ; and I know the sea is showing us its nega- 
tive side ; there is a lull in the battle. But wait a 
little and the mad assault of the waves upon the 
land will be renewed. 

PALM AND FIST 

The palm is for friendship, hospitality, and good 
will ; the fist is to smite the enemies of truth and 
justice. 

How many men are like the clenched fist — pug- 
nacious, disputatious, quarrelsome, always spoil- 
ing for a fight ; a verbal fisticuff, if not a physical 
one, is their delight. Others are more concilia- 
tory and peace-loving, not forgetting that a soft 
answer turneth away wrath. Roosevelt was the 
man of the clenched fist ; not one to stir up strife, 
but a merciless hitter in what he believed a just 
cause. He always had the fighting edge, yet could 
be as tender and sympathetic as any one. This 
latter side of him is clearly shown in his recently 
published " Letters to His Children." Lincoln 

1 La Jolla, California. 
220 



SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS 

was, in contrast, the man with the open palm, tem- 
pering justice with kindness, and punishment with 
leniency. His War Secretary, Stanton, wielded the 
hard fist. 

PRAISE AND FLATTERY 

" More men know how to flatter," said Wendell 
Phillips, " than how to praise." To flatter is 
easy, to condemn is easy, but to praise judiciously 
and discriminatingly is not easy. Extravagant 
praise defeats itself, as does extravagant blame. 
A man is rarely overpraised during his own time 
by his own people. If he is an original, forceful 
character, he is much more likely to be overblamed 
than overpraised. He disturbs old ways and in- 
stitutions. We require an exalted point of view 
to take in a great character, as we do to take in a 
great mountain. 

We are likely to overpraise and overblame our 
presidents. Lincoln was greatly overblamed in 
his day, but we have made it up to his memory. 
President Wilson won the applause of both politi- 
cal parties during his first term, but how over- 
whelmingly did the tide -turn against him before 
the end of his second term ! All his high and heroic 
service (almost his martyrdom) in the cause of 
peace, and for the league to prevent war, were 
forgotten in a mad rush of the populace to the 
other extreme. But Wilson will assuredly come 
221 



THE LAST HARVEST 

to his own in time, and take his place among the 
great presidents. 

A little of the Scottish moderation is not so bad ; 
it is always safe. A wise man will always prefer 
unjust blame to fulsome praise. Extremes in the 
estimation of a sound character are bound sooner 
or later to correct themselves. Wendell Phillips 
himself got more than his share of blame during 
the antislavery days, but the praise came in due 
time. 

GENIUS AND TALENT 

The difference between the two is seen in nothing 
more clearly than in the fact that so many educated 
persons can and do write fairly good verse, in fact, 
write most of the popular newspaper and magazine 
poetry, while only those who have a genius for 
poetry write real poems. Could mere talent have 
written Bryant's lines "To a Waterfowl " ? or 
his " Thanatopsis " ? or " June " ? Or the small 
volume of selections of great poetry which Arnold 
made from the massive works of Wordsworth ? 

Talent could have produced a vast deal of 
Wordsworth's work — all the " Ecclesiastical Son- 
nets " and much of " The Excursion." Could 
talent have written Walt Whitman's " Leaves of 
Grass *'? It could have produced all that Whit- 
man wrote before that time — all his stories and 
poems. Give talent inspiration and it becomes 



SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS 

genius. The grub is metamorphosed into the 
butterfly. 

" To do what is impossible to Talent is the mark 
of Genius," says Amiel. 

Talent may judge, Genius creates. Talent keeps 
the rules, Genius knows when to break them. 

" You may know Genius,*' says the ironical 
Swift, "by this sign: All the dunces are against 
him.' , 

There is fine talent in Everett's oration at Get- 
tysburg, but what a different quality spoke in 
Lincoln's brief but immortal utterance on the 
same occasion ! Is anything more than bright, 
alert talent shown in the mass of Lowell's work, 
save perhaps in his " Biglow Papers " ? If he had 
a genius for poetry, though he wrote much, I can- 
not see it. His tone, as Emerson said, is always 
that of prose. The " Cathedral " is a tour de force. 
The line of his so often quoted — " What is so rare 
as a day in June ? " — is a line of prose. 

The lines " To a Honey Bee" by John Russell Mc- 
Carthy are the true gold of poetry. "To make 
of labor an eternal lust" could never have been 
struck off by mere talent. 

INVENTION AND DISCOVERY 

Columbus discovered America; Edison invented 

the phonograph, the incandescent light, and many 

other things. If Columbus had not discovered 

223 



THE LAST HARVEST 

America, some other voyager would have. If 
Harvey had not discovered the circulation of the 
blood, some one else would have. The wonder is that 
it was not discovered ages before. So far as I know, 
no one has yet discovered the function of the spleen, 
but doubtless in time some one will. It is only 
comparatively recently that the functions of other 
ductless glands have been discovered. What did 
we know about the thyroid gland a half-century 
ago? All the new discoveries in the heavens 
waited upon the new astronomic methods, and 
the end is not yet. Many things in nature are 
still like an unexplored land. New remedies for 
the ills of the human body doubtless remain to be 
found. In the mechanical world probably no new 
principle remains to be discovered. " Keely " 
frauds have had their day. In the chemical 
world, the list of primary elements will probably 
not be added to, though new combinations of these 
elements may be almost endless. In the biological 
world, new species of insects, birds, and mammals 
doubtless remain to be discovered. Our knowl- 
edge of the natural history of the globe is far from 
being complete. 

But in regard to inventions the case is different. 
I find myself speculating on such a question as this : 
If Edison had never been born, should we ever 
have had the phonograph, or the incandescent 
light? If Graham Bell had died in infancy, 
224 



SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS 

should we ever have had the telephone? Or 
without Marconi should we have had the wireless, 
or without Morse, the telegraph ? Or, to go back 
still farther, without Franklin should we ever have 
known the identity of lightning and electricity? 
Who taught us how to control electricity and make 
it do our work ? One of the questions of Job was, 
" Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, 
and say unto thee, Here we are ? " Yes, we can. 
"We are ready to do your bidding," they seem to 
say, " to run your errands, to carry your burdens, to 
grind your grist, to light your houses, to destroy 
your enemies.'* 

The new inventions that the future holds for us 
wait upon the new man. The discovery of radium 
— what a secret that was ! But in all probability 
had not Curie and his wife discovered it, some 
other investigator would. 

Shall we ever learn how to use the atomic energy 
that is locked up in matter? Or how to use 
the uniform temperature of the globe ? Or the se- 
cret of the glow-worm and firefly — light without 
heat? 

The laws of the conservation of energy and of 
the correlation of forces were discoveries. The 
art of aviation was both an invention and a dis- 
covery. The soaring hawks and eagles we have 
always been familiar with; the Wright brothers 
invented the machine that could do the trick. 
225 



THE LAST HARVEST 

" Necessity is the mother of invention." As our 
wants increase, new devices to meet them appear. 
How the diving-bell answered a real need! The 
motor-car also, and the flying-machine. The 
sewing-machine is a great time-saver; the little 
hooks in our shoes in place of eyelets are great time- 
savers; pins, and friction matches, and rubber 
overshoes, and scores on scores of other inventions 
answer to real needs. Necessity did not call the 
phonograph into being, nor the incandescent light, 
but the high explosives, dynamite and T. N. T. 
(trinitrotoluol) met real wants. 

The Great War with its submarines stimulated 
inventors to devise weapons to cope with them. 
Always as man's hand and eyes and ears have 
needed reenforcing or extending, his wit has come 
to his rescue. In fact, his progress has been con- 
tingent upon this very fact. His necessities and 
his power of invention react upon one another; 
the more he invents, the more he wants, and the 
more he wants, the more he invents. 

TOWN AND COUNTRY 

I was saying to myself, Why do not all literary 
men go to the country to do their work, where they 
can have health, peace, and solitude? Then it 
occurred to me that there are many men of many 
minds, and that many need to be in the thick of 
life ; they get more stimulus out of people than out 



SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS 

of nature. The novelist especially needs to be in 
touch with multitudes of men and women. But 
the poet and the philosopher will usually prosper 
better in the country. A man like myself, who is 
an observer and of a meditative cast, does better 
in the country. Emerson, though city born and 
bred, finally settled in the country. Whitman, 
on the other hand, loved " populous pavements." 
But he was at home anywhere under the stars. 
He had no study, no library, no club, other than 
the street, the beach, the hilltop, and the marts of 
men. Mr. Howells was country-born, but came 
to the city for employment and remained there. 
Does not one wish that he had gone back to his 
Ohio boyhood home? It was easy for me to go 
back because I came of generations of farmer folk. 
The love of the red soil was in my blood. My na- 
tive hills looked like the faces of my father and 
mother. I could never permanently separate my- 
self from them. I have always had a kind of 
chronic homesickness. Two or three times a year 
I must revisit the old scenes. I have had a land- 
surveyor make a map of the home farm, and I have 
sketched in and colored all the different fields as I 
knew them in my youth. I keep the map hung 
up in my room here in California, and when I want 
to go home, I look at this map. I do not see the 
paper. I see fields and woods and stone walls and 
paths and roads and grazing cattle. In this field 
227 



THE LAST HARVEST 

I used to help make hay ; in this one I wore my 
fingers sore picking up stones for these stone walls ; 
in this I planted corn and potatoes with my broth- 
ers. In these maple woods I helped make sugar 
in the spring; in these I killed my first ruffed 
grouse. In this field I did my first ploughing, with 
thoughts of an academy in a neighboring town at 
the end of every furrow. In this one I burned the 
dry and decayed stumps in the April days, with 
my younger brother, and a spark set his cap on 
fire. In this orchard I helped gather the apples 
in October. In this barn we husked the corn in 
the November nights. In this one Father sheared 
the sheep, and Mother picked the geese. My pa- 
ternal grandfather cleared these fields and planted 
this orchard. I recall the hired man who worked 
for us during my time, and every dog my father 
had, and my adventures with them, hunting wood- 
chucks and coons. All these things and memories 
have been valuable assets in my life. But it is 
well that not all men have my strong local at- 
tachments. The new countries would never get 
settled. My forefathers would never have left 
Connecticut for the wilderness of the Catskills. 

As a rule, however, we are a drifting, cosmopolitan 
people. We are easily transplanted; we do not 
strike our roots down into the geology of long-gone 
time. 

I often wonder how so many people of the Old 
228 



SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS 

World can pull themselves up and migrate to 
America and never return. The Scots, certainly 
a home-loving race, do it, and do not seem to suffer 
from homesickness. 



229 



VII 
DAY BY DAY 

We often hear it said of a man that he was born 
too early, or too late, but is it ever true ? If he is 
behind his times, would he not have been behind 
at whatever period he had been born? If he is 
ahead of his times, is not the same thing true ? In 
the vegetable world the early flowers and fruit 
blossoms are often cut off by the frost, but not so 
in the world of man. Babies are in order at any 
time. Is a poet, or a philosopher, ever born too 
late? or too early? If Emerson had been born a 
century earlier, his heterodoxy would have stood 
in his way; but in that case he would not have 
been a heretic. Whitman would have had to wait 
for a hearing at whatever period he was born. He 
said he was willing to wait for the growth of the 
taste for himself, and it finally came. Emerson's 
first thin volume called " Nature " did not sell the 
first edition of five hundred copies in ten years, 
but would it have been different at any other time ? 
A piece of true literature is not superseded. The 
fame of man may rise and fall, but it lasts. Was 
Watt too early with his steam-engine, or Morse 



DAY BY DAY 

too early with his telegraph? Or Bell too early 
with his telephone? Or Edison with his phono- 
graph or his incandescent light? Or the Wright 
brothers with their flying-machine? Or Henry 
Ford with his motor-car ? Before gasolene was dis- 
covered they would have been too early, but then 
their inventions would not have materialized. 

The world moves, and great men are the springs 
of progress. But no man is born too soon or too 
late. 

A fadeless flower is no flower at all. How Na- 
ture ever came to produce one is a wonder. Would 
not paper flowers do as well ? 

The most memorable days in our lives are 
the days when we meet a great man. 

How stealthy and silent a thing is that terrible 
power which we have under control in our homes, 
yet which shakes the heavens in thunder! It comes 
and goes as silently as a spirit. In fact, it is 
nearer a spirit than anything else known to us. 
We touch a button and here it is, like an errand- 
boy who appears with his cap in his hand and 
meekly asks, " What will you have? " 

A few days ago I was writing of meteoric men. 
But are we not all like meteors that cut across the 
231 



THE LAST HARVEST 

sky and are quickly swallowed up by the darkness 
— some of us leaving a trail that lasts a little 
longer than others, but all gone in a breath ? 

Our great pulpit orator Beecher, how little he 
left that cold print does not kill ! As a young man 
I used nearly to run my legs off to get to Plymouth 
Church before the doors were closed. Under his 
trumpet-like voice I was like a reed bent by the 
wind, but now when in a book made up of quota- 
tions I see passages from his sermons, they seem 
thin and flimsy. Beecher's oratory was all for 
the ear and not for the eye and mind. In truth, 
is the world indebted to the pulpit for much good 
literature? Robertson's sermons can be read in 
the library, and there are others of the great Eng- 
lish divines. But oratory is action and passion. 
" Great volumes of animal heat," Emerson names 
as one of the qualities of the orator. 

The speeches of Wendell Phillips will bear print 
because his oratory was of the quiet, conversational 
kind. Webster's, of course, stand the test of print, 
but do Clay's or Calhoun's ? In our time oratory, 
as such, has about gone out. Rarely now do we 
hear the eagle scream in Congress or on the plat- 
form. Men aim to speak earnestly and convinc- 
ingly, but not oratorically. President Wilson is 
a very convincing speaker, but he indulges in no 
oratory. The one who makes a great effort to be 
eloquent always fails. Noise and fury and over- 
232 



DAY BY DAY 

emphasis are not eloquent. " True eloquence,* * 
says Pascal, " scorns eloquence." 

There is no moral law in nature, but there is 
that out of which the moral law arose. There is 
no answer to prayer in the heavens above, or in 
the earth beneath, except in so far as the attitude 
of sincere prayer is a prophecy of the good it pleads 
for. Prayer for peace of mind, for charity, for 
gratitude, for light, for courage, is answered in the 
sincere asking. Prayer for material good is often 
prayer against wind and tide, but wind and tide 
obey those who can rule them. 

Our ethical standards injected into world-his- 
tory lead to confusion and contradiction. Intro- 
duced into the jungle, they would put an end to 
life there ; introduced into the sea, they would put 
an end to life there ; the rule that it is more blessed 
to give than to receive would put an end to all 
competitive business. Our ethical standards are 
narrow, artificial, and apply only to civilized com- 
munities. Nations have rarely observed them till 
the present day. 

If the world is any better for my having lived 
in it, it is because I have pointed the way to a sane 
and happy life on terms within reach of all, in my 
love and joyous acceptance of the works of Nature 
about me. I have not tried, as the phrase is, to 
lead my readers from Nature up to Nature's God, 



THE LAST HARVEST 

because I cannot separate the one from the other. 
If your heart warms toward the visible creation, 
and toward your fellow men, you have the root of 
the matter in you. The power we call God does 
not sustain a mechanical or secondary relation to 
the universe, but is vital in it, or one with it. To 
give this power human lineaments and attributes, 
as our fathers did, only limits and belittles it. And 
to talk of leading from Nature up to Nature's God 
is to miss the God that throbs in every spear of 
grass and vibrates in the wing of every insect 
that hums. The Infinite is immanent in this 
universe. 

"The faith that truth exists" is the way that 
William James begins one of his sentences. Of 
course truth exists where the mind of man exists. 
A new man and there is new truth. Truth, in this 
sense, is a way of looking at things that is agreeable, 
or that gives satisfaction to the human mind. 
Truth is not a definite fixed quantity, like the gold 
or silver of a country. It is no more a fixed quan- 
tity than is beauty. It is an experience of the 
human mind. Beauty and truth are what we 
make them. We say the world is full of beauty. 
What we mean is that the world is full of things 
that give us the pleasure, or awaken in us the sen- 
timent which we call by that name. 

The broadest truths are born of the broadest 
234 



DAY BY DAY 

minds. Narrow minds are so named from their 
narrow views of things. 

Pilate's question, " What is Truth ? " sets the 
whole world by the ears. The question of right 
and wrong is another thing. Such questions refer 
to action and the conduct of our lives. In reli- 
gion, in politics, in economics, in sociology, what 
is truth to one man may be error to another. We 
may adopt a course of action because it seems the 
more expedient. Debatable questions have two 
sides to them. In the moral realm that is true 
which is agreeable to the largest number of com- 
petent judges. A mind that could see further 
and deeper might reverse all our verdicts. To be 
right on any question in the moral realm is to be 
in accord with that which makes for the greatest 
good to the greatest number. In our Civil War 
the South believed itself right in seceding from the 
Union; the North, in fighting to preserve the 
Union. Both sections now see that the North 
had the larger right. The South was sectional, 
the North national. Each of the great political 
parties thinks it has a monopoly of the truth, but 
the truth usually lies midway between them. 
Questions of right and wrong do not necessarily 
mean questions of true and false. " There is 
nothing either good or bad," says Hamlet, " but 
thinking makes it so." This may be good Chris- 
tian Science doctrine, but it is doubtful philosophy, 
23$ 



THE LAST HARVEST 

Yesterday, as I stood on the hill above Slab- 
sides and looked over the landscape dotted with 
farms just greening in the April sun, the thought 
struck me afresh that all this soil, all the fertile fields, 
all these leagues on leagues of sloping valleys and 
rolling hills came from the decay of the rocks, and 
that the chief agent in bringing about this decay 
and degradation was the gentle rain from heaven 
— that without the rain through the past geologic 
ages, the scene I looked upon would have been 
only one wild welter of broken or crumpled rocky 
strata, not a green thing, not a living thing, should 
I have seen. 

In the Hawaiian Islands one may have proof of 
this before his eyes. On one end of the island of 
Maui, the rainfall is very great, and its deep valleys 
and high sharp ridges are clothed with tropical 
verdure, while on the other end, barely ten miles 
away, rain never falls, and the barren, rocky deso- 
lation which the scene presents I can never for- 
get. No rain, no soil ; no soil, no life. 

We are, therefore, children of the rocks; the 
rocks are our mother, and the rains our father. 

When the stream of life, through some favor- 
ing condition, breaks through its natural checks and 
bounds, and inundates and destroys whole prov- 
inces of other forms, as when the locusts, the 
236 



DAY BY DAY 

forest-worms, the boll-weevil, the currant-worm, 
the potato beetle, unduly multiply and devastate 
fields and forests and the farmer's crops, what do 
we witness but Nature's sheer excess and intem- 
perance? Life as we usually see it is the result 
of a complex system of checks and counter-checks. 
The carnivorous animals are a check on the her- 
bivorous ; the hawks and owls are a check on the 
birds and fowls ; the cats and weasels are a check 
on the small rodents, which are very prolific. The 
different species of plants and trees are a check 
upon one another. 

I think the main reason of the abundance of 
wealth in the country is that every man, equipped 
as he is with so many modern scientific appliances 
and tools, is multiplied four or five times. He is 
equal to that number of men in his capacity to do 
things as compared with the men of fifty or sev- 
enty years ago. The farmer, with his mowing- 
machine, his horse-rake, his automobile, his tractor 
engine and gang ploughs or his sulky ploughs, his 
hay-loader, his corn-planter, and so on, does the 
work of many men. Machinery takes the place 
of men. Gasolene and kerosene oil give man a 
great advantage. Dynamite, too, — what a giant 
that is in his service! The higher cost of living 
does not offset this advantage. 

The condition in Europe at this time is quite 
237 



THE LAST HARVEST 

different : there the energies of men have been di- 
rected not to the accumulation of wealth, but to 
the destruction of wealth. Hence, while the war 
has enriched us, it has impoverished Europe. 

Why are women given so much more to orna- 
ments and superfluities in dress and finery than 
men? In the animal kingdom below man, save 
in a few instances, it is the male that wears the 
showy decorations. The male birds have the 
bright plumes ; the male sheep have the big horns ; 
the stag has the antlers; the male lion has the 
heavy mane; the male firefly has wings and car- 
ries the lamp. With the barnyard fowl the male 
has the long spurs and the showy comb and wat- 
tles. In the crow tribe, the male cannot be dis- 
tinguished from the female, nor among the fly- 
catchers, nor among the snipes and plovers. But 
when we come to the human species, and especially 
among the white races, the female fairly runs riot in 
ornamentation. If it is not to attract the male, what 
is it for ? It has been pretty clearly shown that what 
Darwin calls " sexual selection" plays no part. 
Woman wishes to excite the passion of love. She has 
an instinct for motherhood ; the perpetuity of the 
species is at the bottom of it all. Woman knows 
how to make her dress alluring, how to make it 
provocative, how much to reveal, how much to 
conceal. A certain voluptuousness is the ambition 
238 



DAY BY DAY 

of all women ; anything but to be skinny and raw- 
boned. She does not want to be muscular and 
flat-chested, nor, on the other hand, to be over- 
stout, but she prays for the flowing lines and 
the plumpness that belong to youth. A lean man 
does not repel her, nor a rugged, bony frame. 
Woman's garments are of a different texture and 
on a different scale than those of man, and much 
more hampering. Her ruffles and ribbons and 
laces all play their part. Her stockings even are 
a vital problem, more important than her religion. 
We do not care where she worships if her dress 
is attractive. Emerson reports that a lady said 
to him that a sense of being well-dressed at church 
gave a satisfaction which religion could not give. 

With man the male defends and safeguards the 
female. True that among savage tribes he makes 
a slave of her, but in the white races he will de- 
fend her with his life. She does not take up arms, 
she does not go to sea. She does not work in 
mines, or as a rule engage in the rough work of 
the world. In Europe she works in the field, and 
we have had farmerettes in this country, but I 
know of no feminine engineers or carpenters or 
stone masons. There have been a few women 
explorers and Alpine climbers, and investigators 
in science, but only a few. The discovery of ra- 
dium is chiefly accredited to a woman, and women 
have a few valuable inventions to their credit. I 
239 



THE LAST HARVEST 

saw a valuable and ingenious machine, in a great 
automobile factory, that was invented by a woman. 
Now that woman has won the franchise in this 
country, we are waiting to see if politics will be 
purified. 

The " weaker sex," surely. How much easier 
do women cry than men ! how much more easily 
are they scared ! And yet, how much more pain 
they can endure ! And how much more devoted 
are they to their children ! 

Why does any extended view from a mountain- 
top over a broad landscape, no matter what the 
features of that landscape, awaken in us the emo- 
tion of the beautiful? Is it because the eye loves 
a long range, a broad sweep? Or do we have a 
sense of victory? The book of the landscape is 
now open before us, and we can read it page after 
page. All these weary miles where we tramped, 
and where the distance, as it were, was in ambush, 
we now command at a glance. Big views expand 
the mind as deep inhalations of air expand the 
lungs. 

Yesterday I stood on the top of Grossmont, 1 
probably a thousand feet above the landscape, 
and looked out over a wide expanse of what seemed 
to be parched, barren country; a few artificial 
lakes or ponds of impounded rains, but not a green 
1 In San Diego County, California. 
240 



DAY BY DAY 

thing in sight, and yet I was filled with pleasurable 
emotion. I lingered and lingered and gazed and 
gazed. The eye is freed at such times, like a 
caged bird, and darts far and near without hin- 
drance. 

"The wings of time are black and white, 
Pied with morning and with night." 

Thus do we objectify that which has no objec- 
tive existence, but is purely a subjective experience. 
Do we objectify light and sound in the same way ? 
No. One can conceive of the vibrations in the 
ether that give us the sensation of light, and in the 
air that give us sound. These vibrations do not 
depend upon our organs. Time and tide, we say, 
wait for no man. Certainly the tide does not, as 
it has a real objective existence. But time does 
not wait or hurry. It neither lags nor hastens. 
Yesterday does not exist, nor to-morrow, nor the 
Now, for that matter. Before we can say the mo- 
ment has come, it is gone. The only change 
there is is in our states of consciousness. How 
the hours lag when we are waiting for a train, 
and how they hurry when we are happily em- 
ployed ! Can we draw a line between the past 
and the present? Can you find a point in the 
current of the stream that is stationary ? We speak 
of being lavish of time and of husbanding time, of 
improving time, and so on. We divide it into 
241 



THE LAST HARVEST 

seconds and minutes, hours and days, weeks, and 
months, and years. Civilized man is compelled to 
do this ; he lives and works by schedule, but it is 
his states of consciousness that he divides and 
measures. " Time is but a stream I go fishing 
in," says Thoreau. The stream goes by, but the 
fish stay. The river of Time, the tooth of Time 
— happy comparisons. 

" I wasted time and now time wastes me," says 
Shakespeare. " I have no time." " You have 
all there is," replied the old Indian. 

If time, like money, could be hoarded up, we 
could get all our work done. Is there any time 
outside of man ? The animals take no note of time. 

That is a good saying of Juvenal's, " He who 
owns the soil, owns up to the sky." So is this of 
Virgil's, " Command large fields, but cultivate small 
ones." 

Can there be any theory or doctrine not con- 
nected with our practical lives so absurd that it 
will not be accepted as true by many people? 
How firmly was a belief in witchcraft held by whole 
populations for a generation ! My grandfather be- 
lieved in it, and in spooks and hobgoblins. 

The belief in alchemy still prevails — that the 
baser metals, by the aid of the philosopher's stone, 
can be transmuted into gold and silver. Quite 
242 



DAY BY DAY 

recently there was a school in a large town in Cal- 
ifornia for teaching alchemy. As it was a failure, 
its professor was involved in litigation with his 
pupils. I believe the pupils were chiefly women. 

There is a sect in Florida that believe that we 
live on the inside of a hollow sphere, instead of on the 
outside of a revolving globe. I visited the com- 
munity with Edison, near Fort Myers, several 
years ago. Some of the women were fine- 
looking. One old lady looked like Martha Wash- 
ington, but the men all looked "as if they had a 
screw loose somewhere." They believe that the 
sun and moon and all the starry hosts of heaven 
revolve on the inside of this hollow sphere. All 
our astronomy goes by the board. They look 
upon it as puerile and contemptible. The founder 
of the sect had said he would rise from the dead 
to confirm its truth. His disciples kept his body 
till the Board of Health obliged them to bury it. 

If any one were seriously to urge that we really 
walk on our heads instead of our heels, and cite 
our baldness as proof, there are persons who would 
believe him. It has been urged that flight to the 
moon in an aeroplane is possible — the want of air 
is no hindrance ! The belief in perpetual motion 
is not yet dead. Many believe that snakes charm 
birds. But it has been found that a stuffed snake- 
skin will " charm " birds also — the bird is hyp- 
notized by its own fear. 

243 



THE LAST HARVEST 

What has become of the hermits ? — men 
and women who preferred to live alone, hold- 
ing little or no intercourse with their fellows ? In 
my youth I knew of several such. There was old 
Ike Keator, who lived in a little unpainted house 
beside the road near the top of the mountain where 
we passed over into Batavia Kill. He lived there 
many years. He had a rich brother, a farmer in 
the valley below. Then there was Eri Gray, who 
lived to be over one hundred years. He occupied 
a little house on the side of a mountain, and lived, 
it was said, like the pigs in the pen. Then there 
was Aunt Deborah Bouton, who lived in a little 
house by a lonely road and took care of her little 
farm and her four or five cows, winter and summer. 
Since I have lived here on the Hudson there was a 
man who lived alone in an old stone house amid 
great filth on the top of the hill above Esopus village. 

In my own line of descent there was a Kelley who 
lived alone in a hut in the woods, not far from 
Albany. I myself must have a certain amount of 
solitude, but I love to hear the hum of life all about 
me. I like to be secluded in a building warmed 
by the presence of other persons. 

When I was a boy on the old farm, the bright, 
warm, midsummer days were canopied with the 
mellow hum of insects. You did not see them or 
244 



DAY BY DAY 

distinguish any one species, but the whole upper 
air resounded like a great harp. It was a very 
marked feature of midday. But not for fifty 
years have I heard that sound. I have pressed 
younger and sharper ears into my service, but to 
no purpose : there are certainly fewer bumblebees 
than of old, but not fewer flies or wasps or hornets 
or honey bees. What has wrought the change I 
do not know. 

If the movements going on around us in inert 
matter could be magnified so as to come within 
range of our unaided vision, how agitated the world 
would seem! The so-called motionless bodies 
are all vibrating and shifting their places day and 
night at all seasons. The rocks are sliding down 
the hills or creeping out of their beds, the stone 
walls are reeling and toppling, the houses are set- 
tling or leaning. All inert material raised by the 
hand of man above the earth's surface is slowly 
being pulled down to a uniform level. The crust 
of the earth is rising or subsiding. The very stars 
in the constellations are shifting their places. 

If we could see the molecular and chemical 
changes and transformations that are going or 
around us, another world of instability would be 
revealed to us. Here we should see real mira- 
cles. We should see the odorless gases unite to 
form water. We should see the building of 
245 



THE LAST HARVEST 

crystals, catalysis, and the movements of unstable 
compounds. 

Think of what Nature does with varying degrees 
of temperature — solids, fluids, gases. From the 
bottom to the top of the universe means simply 
more or less heat. It seems like a misuse of words 
to say that iron freezes at a high temperature, that 
a bar of red-hot or white-hot iron is frozen. Water 
freezes at a high temperature, the air freezes at a 
vastly lower. Carbon dioxide becomes a solid at 
a very low temperature. Hydrogen becomes a 
liquid at 252° below zero centigrade, and a solid 
at 264°. The gas fluorine becomes a liquid at 
210° below zero centigrade. 

In a world of absolute zero everything would be 
as solid as the rocks, all life, all chemical reactions 
would cease. All forms of water are the result of 
more or less heat. The circuit of the waters from 
the earth to the clouds and back again, which keeps 
all the machinery of life a-going, is the work of 
varying degrees of temperature. The Gulf Stream, 
which plays such a part in the climate of Europe, 
is the result of the heat in the Gulf of Mexico. 
The glacial periods which have so modified the 
surface of the earth in the past were the result of 
temperature changes. 

How habitually we speak of beauty as a positive 
246 



DAY BY DAY 

thing, just as we do of truth! whereas what we 
call beauty is only an emotional experience of our 
own minds, just as light and heat are sensations 
of our bodies. There is no light where there is no 
eye, and no sound where there is no ear. One is a 
vibration in the ether, and the other a vibration in 
the air. The vibrations are positive. We do not 
all see beauty in the same things. One man is 
unmoved where another is thrilled. We say the 
world is full of beauty, when we mean that it is 
full of objects that excite this emotion in our minds. 

We speak of truth as if it, too, were a positive 
thing, and as if there were a fixed quantity of it in 
the world, as there is of gold or silver, or diamonds. 
Truth, again, is an intellectual emotion of the hu- 
man mind. One man's truth is another man's 
falsehood — moral and aesthetic truth, I mean. 
Objective truth (mathematics and science) must 
be the same to all men. 

A certain mode of motion in the molecules of 
matter gives us the sensation of heat, but heat is 
not a thing, an entity in itself, any more than cold 
is. Yet to our senses one seems just as positive 
as the other. 

New truth means a new man. There are as 
many kinds of truth as there are human expe- 
riences and temperaments. 

How adaptive is animal life ! It adds a new 

247 



THE LAST HARVEST 

touch of interest to the forbidding cactus to know 
that the cactus wren builds her nest between its 
leaves. The spines probably serve to protect the 
bird from her enemies. But are they not also a 
menace to her and to her young ? But this " pro- 
creant cradle " of a bird in the arms of the fanged 
desert growth softens its aspect a little. 

The tree of forbidden fruit — the Tree of Knowl- 
edge — how copiously has mankind eaten of it 
during these latter generations ! — and the chaotic 
state of the world to-day is the result. We have 
been forcing Nature's hand on a tremendous scale. 
We have gained more knowledge and power than 
we can legitimately use. We are drunk with the 
sense of power. We challenge the very gods. 
The rapid increase of inventions and the harness- 
ing of the powers of Nature have set all nations to 
manufacturing vastly more goods than they can 
use and they all become competitors for world 
markets, and rivalries and jealousies spring up, 
and the seeds of war are planted. The rapid 
growth of towns and cities is one of the results. 
The sobering and humanizing influence of the 
country and the farm are less and less in evidence ; 
the excitement, the excesses, the intoxication of 
the cities are more and more. The follies and ex- 
travagances of wealth lead to the insolence and re- 
bellion of the poor. Material power ! Drunk with 
248 



DAY BY DAY 

this power, the world is running amuck to-day. 
We have got rid of kings and despots and auto- 
cratic governments; now if we could only keep 
sober and make democracy safe and enjoyable ! 
Too much science has brought us to grief. Be- 
hold what Chemistry has done to put imperial 
power in our hands during the last decade ! 

The grand movements of history and of man- 
kind are like the movements of nature, under the 
same law, elemental, regardless of waste and ruin 
and delays — not the result of human will or de- 
sign, but of forces we wot not of. They are of 
the same order as floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, 
a release of human forces that have slumbered. 
The chaos of Europe to-day shows the play of such 
elemental forces, unorganized, at cross-purposes, 
antagonistic, fighting it out in the attempt to find 
an equilibrium. The pain, the suffering, the 
waste, the delays, do not trouble the gods at all. 
Since man is a part of nature, why should not 
masses of men be ruled by natural law? The hu- 
man will reaches but a little way. 



vni 

GLEANINGS 

I do not believe that one poet can or does efface 
another, as Arnold suggests. As every gas is a 
vacuum to every other gas, so every new poet is 
a vacuum to every other poet. Wordsworth told 
Arnold that for many years his poems did not 
bring him enough to buy his shoestrings. The 
reading public had to acquire a taste for him. 
Whitman said, " I am willing to wait for the 
growth of the taste of myself/' A man who likes 
a poet of real worth is going to continue to like 
him, no matter what new man appears. He may 
not read him over and over, but he goes back to 
him when the mood is upon him. We listen to the 
same music over and over. We take the same 
walk over and over. We read Shakespeare over 
and over, and we go back to the best in Words- 
worth over and over. We get in Tennyson what 
we do not get in Wordsworth, and we as truly get 
in Wordsworth what we do not get in Tennyson. 
Tennyson was sumptuous and aristocratic. By- 
ron found his audience, but he did not rob Words- 
worth. 

250 



GLEANINGS 

It seems to me that the preeminence of Words- 
worth lies in the fact that he deals so entirely with 
concrete things — men and objects in nature — and 
floods or saturates them with moral meanings. 
There is no straining, no hair-splitting, no contor- 
tions of the oracle, but it all comes as naturally as 
the sunrise or the sunset. 

Things not beautiful in themselves, or when 
seen near at hand, may and do give us the sense of 
beauty when seen at a distance, or in mass. Who 
has not stood on a mountain-top, and seen before 
him a wild, disorderly landscape that has never- 
theless awakened in him the emotion of the beau- 
tiful? or that has given him the emotion of the 
sublime? Wordsworth's "Daffodils," "Three 
Years She Grew," " The Solitary Reaper," " The 
Rainbow," " The Butterfly," and many others 
are merely beautiful. These lines from Whitman 
give one the emotion of the sublime : 

"I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, 
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the 
rim of the farther systems. 

"Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, 
Outward and outward and forever outward. 

" My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels, 
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit, 
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside 
them." 

251 



THE LAST HARVEST 

All men may slake their thirst at the same spring 
of water, but all men cannot be thrilled or soothed 
by beholding the same objects of nature. A beau- 
tiful child captivates every one, «a beautiful woman 
ravishes all eyes. On my way to the Imperial 
Valley, I recently drove across a range of Cali- 
fornia mountains that had many striking features. 
A lady asked me if I did not think them beautiful. 
I said, " No, they are hideous, but the hideous may 
be interesting." 

The snow is beautiful to many persons, but it is 
not so to me. It is the color of death. I could 
stand our northern winters very well if I could al- 
ways see the face of the brown or ruddy earth. The 
snow, I know, blankets the fields ; and Emerson's 
poem on the snowstorm is fine ; at the same time, 
I would rather not be obliged to look at the white 
fields. 

We are the first great people without a past in 
the European sense. We are of yesterday. We 
do not strike our roots down deep into the geology 
of long-gone ages. We are easily transplanted. 
We are a mixture of all peoples as the other nations 
of the world are not. Only yesterday we were for- 
eigners ourselves. Then we made the first exper- 
iment on a large scale of a democratic or self- 
governing people. The masses, and not a privi- 
leged few, give the tone and complexion to things 
252 



GLEANINGS 

in this country. We have not yet had time to 
develop a truly national literature or art. We 
have produced but one poet of the highest order. 
Whitman is autochthonous. He had no precur- 
sor. He is a new type of man appearing in this 
field. 

"What think ye of Whitman?" This is the 
question I feel like putting, and sometimes do put, 
to each young poet I meet. If he thinks poorly 
of Whitman, I think poorly of him. I do not ex- 
pect great things of him, and so far my test holds 
good. William Winter thought poorly of Whit- 
man, Aldrich thought poorly of him, and what 
lasting thing has either of them done in poetry? 
The memorable things of Aldrich are in prose. 
Stedman showed more appreciation of him, and 
Stedman wrote two or three things that will keep. 
His " Osawatomie Brown ... he shoved his ramrod 
down " is sure of immortality. Higginson could 
not stand Whitman, and had his little fling at him 
whenever he got the chance. Who reads Higgin- 
son now? Emerson, who far outranks any other 
New England poet, was fairly swept off his feet by 
the first appearance of " Leaves of Grass." Whit- 
tier, I am told, threw the book in the fire. Whit- 
tier's fame has not gone far beyond New England. 
The scholarly and academic Lowell could not tol- 
erate Whitman, and if Lowell has ever written 
253 



THE LAST HARVEST 

any true poetry, I have not seen it. What Long- 
fellow thought of him, I do not know. Thoreau 
saw his greatness at a glance and went to see him. 
In England, I am told, Tennyson used to read 
him aloud in select company. I know that the 
two poets corresponded. We catch a glimpse of 
Swinburne's spasmodic insight in his first burst of 
enthusiasm over him, and then of his weakness in 
recanting. Swinburne's friend and house-mate, 
Watts Dunton, never could endure him, but what 
has he done? So it has gone and still is going, 
though now the acceptance of Whitman has be- 
come the fashion. 

I have always patted myself on the back for 
seeing the greatness of Whitman from the first day 
that I read a line of his. I was bewildered and 
disturbed by some things, but I saw enough to 
satisfy me of his greatness. 

Whitman had the same faith in himself that 
Kepler had in his work. Whitman said : 

" Whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand, 
or ten million years, 
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerful- 
ness I can wait." 

Kepler said: "The die is cast; the book is writ- 
ten, to be read either now or by posterity. I 
care not which. It may well wait a century for a 
reader, since God has waited six thousand years 
for an observer like myself." 
254 



GLEANINGS 

Judging from fragments of his letters that I 
have seen, Henry James was unquestionably 
hypersensitive. In his dislike of publicity he was 
extreme to the point of abnormality; it made 
him ill to see his name in print, except under 
just the right conditions. He wanted all things 
veiled and softened. He fled his country, ab- 
jured it completely. The publicity of it, of 
everything in America — its climate, its day, its 
night, the garish sun, its fierce, blazing light, the 
manner of its people, its politics, its customs — fairly 
made him cringe. During his last visit here he 
tried lecturing, but soon gave it up. He fled to 
veiled and ripened and cushioned England — not 
to the country, but to smoky London ; and there 
his hypersensitive soul found peace and ease. 
He became a British subject, washed himself 
completely of every vestige of Americanism. This 
predilection of his probably accounts for the ob- 
scurity or tantalizing indirectness of his writings. 
The last story I read of his was called " One More 
Turn of the Screw,*' but what the screw was, or 
what the turn was, or whether anybody got pinched 
or squeezed, or what it was all about, I have not 
the slightest idea. He wrote about his visit here, 
his trip to Boston, to Albany, to New York, but 
which town he was writing about you could not 
infer from the context. He had the gift of a rich, 
255 



THE LAST HARVEST 

choice vocabulary, but he wove it into impenetra- 
ble, though silken, veils that concealed more than 
they revealed. When replying to his correspond- 
ents on the typewriter, he would even apologize 
for " the fierce legibility of the type." 

The contrast between the " singing-robes and 
the overalls of Journalism " is true and striking. 
Good and true writing no magazine or newspaper 
editor will blue-pencil. But " fine " writing is a 
different thing — a style that is conscious of itself, 
a style in which the thought is commonplace and 
the language studied and ornate, every judicious 
editor will blue-pencil. Downrightness and sen- 
tentiousness are prime qualities; brevity, con- 
creteness, spontaneity — in fact, all forms of 
genuine expression — help make literature. You 
know the genuine from the spurious, gold from 
pinchbeck, that's the rub. The secret of sound 
writing is not in the language, but in the mind or 
personality behind the language. The dull writer 
and the inspired writer use, or may use, the same 
words, and the product will be gold in the one and 
lead in the other. 

Dana's book ["Two Years Before the Mast"] 

is a classic because it took no thought of being a 

classic. It is a plain, unvarnished tale, not loaded 

up with tedious descriptions. It is all action, a 

256 



GLEANINGS 

perpetual drama in which the sea, the winds, the 
seamen, the sails — mainsail, main royal, foresail 

— play the principal parts. 

There is no book depicting life on the sea to 
compare with it. Lately I have again tried to find 
the secret of its charm. In the first place, it is a 
plain, unvarnished tale, no attempt at fine writ- 
ing in it. All is action from cover to cover. It is 
full of thrilling, dramatic scenes. In fact, it is 
almost a perpetual drama in which the sea, the 
winds, the storms, the sails, and the sailors play 
their parts. Each sail, from the smallest to the 
greatest, has its own character and its own part to 
play; sometimes many of them, sometimes few 
are upon the stage at once. Occasionally all the 
canvas was piled on at once, and then what a 
sight the ship was to behold ! Scudding under bare 
poles was dramatic also. 

The life on board ship in those times — its humor, 
its tedium, its dangers, its hardships — was never 
before so vividly portrayed. The tyranny and 
cruelty of sea-captains, the absolute despotism of 
that little world of the ship's deck, stand out in 
strong relief. Dana had a memory like a phono- 
graphic record. Unless he took copious notes on 
this journey, it is incredible how he could have 
made it so complete, so specific is the life of each 
day. The reader craves more light on one point 

— the size of the ship, her length and tonnage. In 

257 



THE LAST HARVEST 

setting out on the homeward journey they took 
aboard a dozen sheep, four bullocks, a dozen or 
more pigs, three or four dozen of poultry, thou- 
sands of dressed and cured hides, as well as fodder 
and feed for the cattle and poultry and pigs. The 
vessel seemed elastic ; they could always find room 
for a few thousand more hides, if the need arose. 
The hides were folded up like the leaves of a book, 
and they invented curious machinery to press in 
a hundred hides where one could not be forced by 
hand. By this means the forty thousand hides 
were easily disposed of as part of the home cargo. 

The ship becomes a living being to the sailors. 
The Alert was so loaded, her cargo so sieved in, 
that she was stiff as a man in a strait-jacket. But 
the old sailors said: "Stand by. You'll see her 
work herself loose in a week or two, and then she '11 
walk up to Cape Horn like a race-horse." 

It is curious how the sailors can't work together 
without a song. " A song is as necessary to a 
sailor as the drum and fife are to the soldier. They 
can't pull in time, or pull with a will, without it." 
Some songs were much more effective than others. 
" Two or three songs would be tried, one after 
the other, with no effect — not an inch could be 
got upon the tackles, when a new song struck up 
seemed to hit the humor of the moment and drove 
the tackles two blocks at once. * Heave round, 
hearty ! ' ' Captain gone ashore ! ' and the like, 
258 



GLEANINGS 

might do for common pulls, but in an emergency, 
when we wanted a heavy, raise-the-dead pull, 
which would start the beams of the ship, there was 
nothing like * Time for us to go ! ' * Round the 
corner/ or * Hurrah ! Hurrah ! my hearty bul- 
lies ! ■ " 

The mind of the professional critic, like the pro- 
fessional logical mind, becomes possessed of certain 
rules which it adheres to on all occasions. There 
is a well-known legal mind in this country which is 
typical. A recent political opponent of the man 
says: 

His is the type of mind which would have sided with 
King John against granting the Magna Charta; the 
type of mind which would have opposed the ratification 
of the Constitution of the United States because he 
would have found so many holes in it. His is the type 
of mind which would have opposed the Monroe Doctrine 
on the ground that it was dangerous. His is the type 
of mind which would have opposed the Emancipation 
Proclamation on the ground of taking away property 
without due process of law. His is the type of mind 
which would have opposed Cleveland's Venezuela mes- 
sage to England on the ground that it was unprece- 
dented. His is the type of mind which did its best in 
1912 to oppose Theodore Roosevelt's effort to make the 
Republican Party progressive. 

Such a mind would have no use for Roosevelt, for 

instance, because Roosevelt was not bound by 

precedents, but made precedents of his own. The 

259 



THE LAST HARVEST 

typical critical mind, such as Arnold's, would deny 
the title of philosopher to a man who has no con- 
structive talent, who could not build up his own 
philosophy into a system. He would deny another 
the title of poet because his verse has not the 
Miltonic qualities of simplicity, of sensuousness, of 
passion. Emerson was not a great man of letters, 
Arnold said, because he had not the genius and in- 
stinct for style; his prose had not the requisite 
wholeness of good tissue. Emerson's prose is 
certainly not Arnold's prose, but at its best it is 
just as effective. 

It is a good idea of Santayana that " the function 
of poetry is to emotionalize philosophy." 

How absurd, even repulsive, is the argument of 
" Paradise Lost " ! yet here is great poetry, not in 
the matter, but in the manner. 

"Though fallen on evil days, on evil days though fallen." 
"To shun delights and live laborious days." 

Common ideas, but what dignity in the expres- 
sion! 

Criticism is easy. When a writer has nothing 
else to do, he can criticize some other writer. But 
to create and originate is not so easy. One may 
say that appreciation is easy also. How many 
persons appreciate good literature who cannot pro- 
duce it ! 

260 



GLEANINGS 

The rash and the audacious are not the same. 
Audacity means boldness, but to be rash often 
means to be imprudent or foolhardy. When a 
little dog attacks a big dog, as so often happens, 
his boldness becomes rashness. When Charles 
Kingsley attacked Newman, his boldness turned 
out to be rashness. 

Little wonder that in his essay on " Books " 
Emerson recommends Thomas a Kempis's " Imi- 
tation of Christ." Substitute the word Nature 
for God and Christ and much of it will sound very 
Emersonian. Emerson was a kind of New Eng- 
land Thomas a Kempis. His spirit and attitude 
of mind were essentially the same, only directed 
to Nature and the modern world. Humble your- 
self, keep yourself in the background, and let the 
over-soul speak. " I desire no consolation which 
taketh from me compunction." " I love no contem- 
plation which leads to pride." " For all that which 
is high is not holy, nor everything that is sweet, 
good." " I had rather feel contrition, than be 
skilled in the definition of it." " All Scripture 
ought to be read in the spirit in which it was writ- 
ten." How Emersonian all this sounds ! 

In a fat volume of forty thousand quotations 
from the literature of all times and countries, com- 
261 



THE LAST HARVEST 

piled by some patient and industrious person, at 
least half of it is not worth the paper on which it 
is printed. There seem to be more quotations in 
it from Shakespeare than from any other poet, 
which is as it should be. There seem to be more 
from Emerson than from any other American poet, 
which again is as it should be. Those from the 
great names of antiquity — the Bible, Sadi, Cicero, 
^Eschylus, Euripides, Aristotle, and others — are all 
worth while, and the quotations from Bacon, New- 
ton, Addison, Locke, Chaucer, Johnson, Carlyle, 
Huxley, Tennyson, Goethe are welcome. But 
the quotations from women writers and poets, — 
Mrs. He mans, Mrs. Sigourney, Jean Ingelow, and 
others, — what are they worth ? Who would expect 
anything profound from J. G. Holland or Chapin, 
O. W. Holmes, or Alger, or Alcott, or Helps, or 
Dickens, or Lewes, or Froude, or Lowell? I 
certainly should not. 

Such a selection is good to leaf over. Your 
thought may be kindled or fanned here and there. 
The subjects are arranged alphabetically, and em- 
brace nearly all themes of human interest from 
ability to zephyrs. There is very little from Whit- 
man, and, I think, only one quotation from Thoreau. 

The death of Howells gave me a shock. I had 
known him long, though not intimately. He was 
my senior by only one month. It had been two 



GLEANINGS 

years or more since I had seen him. Last Decem- 
ber I read his charming paper on " Eighty Years 
and After" and enjoyed it greatly. It is a mas- 
terpiece. No other American man of letters, past 
or present, could have done that. In fact, there 
has been no other American who achieved the all- 
round literary craftsmanship that Mr. Howells 
achieved. His equal in his own line we have never 
seen. His felicity on all occasions was a wonder. 
His works do not belong to the literature of power, 
but to the literature of charm, grace, felicity. His 
style is as flexible and as limpid as a mountain rill. 
Only among the French do we find such qualities 
in such perfection. Some of his writings — " Their 
Wedding Journey," for instance — are too pho- 
tographic. We miss the lure of the imagination, 
such as Hawthorne gave to all his pictures of real 
things. Only one of Howells's volumes have I 
found too thin for me to finish — his " London 
Films " was too filmy for me. I had read Taine's 
" London Notes " and felt the force of a different 
type of mind. But Howells's " Eighty Years and 
After " will live as a classic. Oh, the felicity of 
his style ! One of his later poems on growing old 
(" On a Bright Winter's Day" it is called) is a 
gem. 



IX 

SUNDOWN PAPERS 

RE-READING BERGSON 

I am trying again to read Bergson's " Creative 
Evolution," with poor success. When I recall 
how I was taken with the work ten or more years 
ago, and carried it with me whenever I went from 
home, I am wondering if my mind has become too 
old and feeble to take it in. But I do not have such 
difficulty with any other of my favorite authors. 
Bergson's work now seems to me a mixture of two 
things that won't mix — metaphysics and natural 
science. It is full of word-splitting and conjuring 
with terms, and abounds in natural history facts. 
The style is wonderful, but the logic is not strong. 
He enlarges upon the inability of the intellect to 
understand or grasp Life. The reason is baffled, 
but sympathy and the emotional nature and the 
intuitions grasp the mystery. 

This may be true, the heart often knows what 
the head does not ; but is it not the intellect that 
tells us so ? The intellect understands the grounds 
of our inability. We can and do reason about the 
limitations of reason. We do not know how mat- 
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ter and spirit blend, but we know they do blend. 
The animals live by instinct, and we live largely in 
our emotions, but it is reason that has placed man 
at the head of the animal kingdom. 

Bergson himself by no means dispenses with 
the logical faculty. Note his close and convincing 
reasoning on the development of the vertebrate 
eye, and how inadequate the Darwinian idea of 
the accumulation of insensible variations is to ac- 
count for it. A closer and more convincing piece 
of reasoning would be hard to find. 

Bergson's conception of two currents — an up- 
ward current of spirit and a downward current 
of matter — meeting and uniting at a definite time 
and place and producing life, is extremely fanciful. 
Where had they both been during all the geologic 
ages ? I do not suppose they had been any where. 
How life arose is, of course, one of the great mys- 
teries. But do we not know enough to see that 
it did not originate in this sudden spectacular 
way ? — that it began very slowly, in unicellular 
germs ? 

At first I was so captivated by the wonderful 
style of M. Bergson, and the richness of his page in 
natural history, that I could see no flaws in his sub- 
ject-matter, but now that my enthusiasm has 
cooled off a little I return to him and am looking 
closer into the text. 

Is not Bergson guilty of false or careless reason- 
265 



THE LAST HARVEST 

ing when he says that the relation of the soul to 
the brain is like that of a coat to the nail upon 
which it hangs ? I call this spurious or pinchbeck 
analogy. If we know anything about it, do we 
not know that the relation of the two is not a me- 
chanical or fortuitous one? and that it cannot be 
defined in this loose way ? 

"To a large extent," Bergson says, " thought 
is independent of the brain." " The brain is, 
strictly speaking, neither an organ of thought, 
nor of feeling, nor of consciousness." He speaks 
of consciousness as if it were a disembodied some- 
thing floating around in the air overhead, like 
wireless messages. If I do not think with my 
brain, with what do I think? Certainly not with 
my legs, or my abdomen, or my chest. I think 
with my head, or the gray matter of my brain. 
I look down at the rest of my body and I say, 
This is part of me, but it is not the real me. 
With both legs and both arms gone, I should still 
be I. But cut off my head and where am I ? 

Has not the intelligence of the animal kingdom 
increased during the geologic ages with the increase 
in the size of the brain ? 

REVISIONS 

I have little need to revise my opinion of any of 
the great names of English literature. I prob- 
ably make more strenuous demands upon him who 
266 



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aspires to be a poet than ever before. I see more 
clearly than ever before that sweetened prose put 
up in verse form does not make poetry any more 
than sweetened water put in the comb in the hive 
makes honey. Many of our would-be young poets 
bring us the crude nectar from the fields — fine 
descriptions of flowers, birds, sunsets, and so on — 
and expect us to accept them as honey. The qual- 
ity of the man makes all the difference in the world. 
A great nature can describe birds and flowers and 
clouds and sunsets and spring and autumn greatly. 

Dean Swift quotes Sir Philip Sidney as saying 
that the " chief life of modern versifying consists 
in rhyme." Swift agrees with him. " Verse 
without rhyme," he says, " is a body without a 
soul, or a bell without a clapper." He thinks 
Milton's " Paradise Lost " would be greatly im- 
proved if it had rhyme. This, he says, would make 
it " more heroic and sonorous than it is." 

Unobtrusive rhyme may be a help in certain 
cases, but what modern reader would say that a 
poem without rhyme is a body without a soul? 
This would exclude many of the noblest produc- 
tions of English literature. 

BERGSON AND TELEPATHY 

Bergson seems always to have been more than 
half -convinced of the truth of spiritualism. When 
we are already half -convinced of a thing, it takes 



THE LAST HARVEST 

but little to convince us. Bergson argues himself 
into a belief in telepathy in this wise : " We pro- 
duce electricity at every moment ; the atmosphere 
is continually electrified; we move amoug mag- 
netic currents. Yet for thousands of years mil- 
lions of human beings have lived who never sus- 
pected the existence of electricity." 

Millions of persons have also lived without 
suspecting the pull of the sun and moon upon us ; 
or that the pressure of the atmosphere upon our 
bodies is fifteen pounds to the square inch; or 
that the coast of this part of the continent is 
slowly subsiding (the oscillations of the earth's 
crust) ; or without suspecting the incredible speed 
of the stars in the midnight sky ; or that the earth 
is turning under our feet; or that electrons are 
shooting off from the candle or lamp by the light 
of which we are reading. There are assuredly 
more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed 
of in our philosophy, many of which we shall doubt- 
less yet find out, and many more of which we shall 
never find out. Wireless messages may be con- 
tinually going through our houses and our bodies, 
and through the air we breathe, and we never 
suspect them. Shall we, then, infer that the air 
around us is full of spirits of our departed friends ? 
I hope it is, but I fail to see any warrant for the 
belief in this kind of reasoning. It does not lend 
color even to the probability, any more than it 
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does to the probability that we shall yet be able 
to read one another's thoughts and become ex- 
pert mind-readers. Mind-reading seems to be a 
reality with a few persons, with one in many mil- 
lions. But I cannot therefore believe in spiritual- 
ism as I believe in the " defeat of the Invincible 
Armada." Fleets have been defeated in all ages. 
Facts are amenable to observation and experi- 
ment, but merely alleged facts do not stand the 
laboratory tests. 

If memory is not a function of the brain, of what 
is it a function ? If " judgment, reasoning, or 
any other act of thought " are not functions of 
the brain, of what are they the functions? The 
scientific method is adequate to deal with all ques- 
tions capable of proof or disproof. If we apply 
the scientific or experimental method to miracles, 
where does it leave them ? Ask Huxley. Thought- 
transference is possible, but does this prove spir- 
itualism to be true ? 

I know of a man who can answer your questions 
if you know the answers yourself, even without 
reading them or hearing you ask them. He once 
read a chemical formula for Edison which no- 
body but Edison had ever seen. I am glad that 
such things are possible. They confirm our faith 
in the reality of the unseen. They show us in 
what a world of occult laws and influences we 
live, but they tell us nothing of any other world. 



THE LAST HARVEST 

METEORIC MEN AND PLANETARY MEN 

There are meteoric men and there are planetary 
men. The men who now and then flash across 
our intellectual heavens, drawing all eyes for the 
moment, these I call meteoric men. What a con- 
trast they present to the planetary men, who are slow 
to attract our attention, but who abide, and do 
not grow dim ! Poets like Emerson, Whitman, 
and Wordsworth were slow to gain recognition, 
but the radiance of their names grows. I call such 
a poet as Swinburne meteoric, a poet of a certain 
kind of brilliant power, but who reads him now? 
Stephen Phillips with his " Marpessa " had a brief 
vogue, and then disappeared in the darkness. 
When I was a young man, I remember, a Scottish 
poet, Alexander Smith, published a " Life Drama," 
which dazzled the literary world for a brief period, 
but it is forgotten now. What attention Kidd's 
" Social Evolution " attracted a generation or 
more ago ! But it is now quite neglected. It was 
not sound. When he died a few years ago there 
was barely an allusion to it in the public press. 
The same fate befell that talented man, Buckle, 
with his " Civilization in England." Delia Ba- 
con held the ear of the public for a time with the 
Bacon-Shakespeare theory. Pulpit men like Jo- 
seph Cook and Adirondack Murray blazed out, 
and then were gone. Half a century ago or more 
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an Englishman by the name of M. F. Tupper pub- 
lished a book called " Proverbial Philosophy " 
which had a brief season of popularity, and then 
went out like a rush-light, or a blaze of tissue 
paper. Novels like Miss Sprague's " Earnest 
Trifler," Du Maurier's " Trilby," and Wallace's 
" Ben Hur " have had their little day, and been 
forgotten. In the art world the Cubists' crazy 
work drew the attention of the public long enough 
for it to be seen how spurious and absurd it was. 
BrownelPs war poems turned out to be little more 
than brief fireworks. Joaquin Miller, where is he ? 
Fifty years ago Gail Hamilton was much in the 
public eye, and Grace Greenwood, and Fanny 
Fern; and in Bohemian circles, there were Agnes 
Franz and Ada Clare, but they are all quite for- 
gotten now. 

The meteoric men would not appreciate Pres- 
ident Wilson's wise saying that he would rather 
fail in a cause that in time is bound to succeed than 
to succeed in a cause that in time is bound to fail. 
Such men cannot wait for success. Meteoric men 
in politics, like Blaine and Conkling, were bril- 
liant men, but were politicians merely. What 
fruitful or constructive ideas did they leave us? 
Could they forget party in the good of the whole 
country? Are not the opponents of the League 
of Nations of our own day in the same case — 
without, however, shining with the same degree 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

of brilliancy? To some of our Presidents — 
Polk, Pierce, Buchanan — we owe little or noth- 
ing. Roosevelt's career, though meteoric in its 
sudden brilliancy, will shine with a steady light 
down the ages. He left lasting results. He raised 
permanently the standard of morality in politics 
and business in this country by the gospel of the 
square deal. Woodrow Wilson, after the mists 
and clouds are all dispelled, will shine serenely on. 
He is one of the few men of the ages. 

THE DAILY PAPERS 

Probably the worst feature of our civilization is 
the daily paper. It scatters crime, bad manners, 
and a pernicious levity as a wind scatters fire. 
Crime feeds upon crime, and the newspapers make 
sure that every criminally inclined reader shall 
have enough to feed upon, shall have his vicious 
nature aroused and stimulated. Is it probable 
that a second and a third President of the United 
States would ever have been assassinated by shoot- 
ing, had not such notoriety been given to the first 
crime? Murder, arson, theft, peculation, are as 
contagious as smallpox. 

Who can help a pitying or a scornful smile when 
he hears of a school of journalism, a school for pro- 
moting crime and debauching the manners and 
the conscience of the people ? — for teaching the 
gentle art of lying, for manufacturing news when 
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there is no news? The pupils are taught, I sup- 
pose, how to serve up the sweepings from the streets 
and the gutters and the bar-rooms in the most en- 
gaging manner. They are taught how to give the 
great Public what it wants, and the one thing the 
great Public wants, and can never get enough of is 
any form of sensationalism. It clearly loves scan- 
dals about the rich, or anything about the rich, 
because we all want and expect to be rich, to out- 
shine our neighbors, to cut a wide swath in society. 
Give us anything about the rich, the Public 
says ; we will take the mud from their shoes ; if we 
can't get that, give us the parings of their finger- 
nails. 

The inelastic character of the newspaper is a 
hampering factor — so many columns must be 
filled, news or no news. And when there is a great 
amount of important news, see how much is sup- 
pressed that but for this inelasticity would have 
been printed ! 

The professor at the school of journalism says : 
" I try to hammer it into them day after day that 
they have got to learn to get the news — that, 
whatever else a reporter can or cannot do, he is n't 
a reporter till he has learned to get the news." 
Hence the invasion of private houses, the brib- 
ery, the stealing of letters, the listening at key- 
holes, the craze for photographing the most sacred 
episodes, the betrayals of confidence, that the 
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THE LAST HARVEST 

newspapers are responsible for. They must get 
what the dear Public most likes to hear, if they 
have to scale a man's housetop, and come down his 
chimney. And if they cannot get the true story, 
they must invent one. The idle curiosity of the 
Public must be satisfied. 

Now the real news, the news the Public is en- 
titled to, is always easy to get. It grows by the 
wayside. The Public is entitled to public news, 
not to family secrets ; to the life of the street and 
the mart, not to life behind closed doors. In the 
dearth of real news, the paper is filled with the 
dust and sweepings from the public highways and 
byways, from saloons, police courts, political halls 
— sordid, ephemeral, and worthless, because it 
would never get into print if there were real news 
to serve up. 

Then the advertising. The items of news now 
peep out at us from between flaming advertise- 
ments of the shopmen's goods, like men on the 
street hawking their wares, each trying to out- 
scream the other and making such a Bedlam that 
our ears are stunned. 1 

1 [This fragment is hardly representative of the attitude of 
Mr. Burroughs toward our worthy dailies, and, could he have 
expanded the article, it would have had in its entirety a dif- 
ferent tone. He lived on the breath of the newspapers; was 
always eager for legitimate news ; and was especially outspoken 
in admiration of the superb work done by many newspaper cor- 
respondents during the World War. Furthermore, he was 
himself always most approachable and friendly to the reporters, 

274 



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THE ALPHABET 

Until we have stopped to think about it, few of 
us realize what it means to have an alphabet — 
the combination of a few straight lines and curves 
which form our letters. When you have learned 
these, and how to arrange them into words, you 
have the key that unlocks all the libraries in the 
world. An assortment and arrangement of black 
lines on a white surface ! These lines mean noth- 
ing in themselves ; they are not symbols, nor pic- 
tures, nor hieroglyphics, yet the mastery of them 
is one of the touchstones of civilization. The prog- 
ress of the race since the dawn of history, or since 
the art of writing has been invented, has gone 
forward with leaps and bounds. The prehistoric 
races, and the barbarous races of our own times, 
had and have only picture language. 

The Chinese have no alphabet. It is said that 
they are now accepting a phonetic alphabet. The 
Chinese system of writing comprises more than 
forty thousand separate symbols, each a different 
word. It requires the memorizing of at least 
three thousand word-signs to read and write their 

complaining, however, that they often failed to quote him when 
he took real pains to help them get things straight ; while they 
often insisted on emphasizing sensational aspects, and even 
put words in his mouth which he never uttered. But the truth 
is, he valued the high-class newspapers, though regarding even 
them as a two-edged sword, since their praiseworthy efforts 
are so vitiated by craze for the sensational. — C. B.] 

275 



THE LAST HARVEST 

language. The national phonetic script is made 
up of sixty distinct characters that answer to 
our twenty-four. These characters embrace every 
verbal sound of the language, and in combination 
make up every word. The progress of China has 
been greatly hampered by this want of an alphabet. 
Coleridge says about the primary art of writing : 
" First, there is mere gesticulation, then rosaries, 
or wampum, then picture language, then hiero- 
glyphics, and finally alphabetic letters," — the 
last an evolution from all that went before. But 
there is no more suggestion of an alphabet in the 
sign language of the North American Indian than 
there is of man in a crinoid. 

THE REDS OF LITERATURE 

A class of young men who seem to look upon them- 
selves as revolutionary poets has arisen, chiefly 
in Chicago ; and they are putting forth the most 
astonishing stuff in the name of free verse that 
has probably ever appeared anywhere. In a late 
number of " Current Opinion," Carl Sandburg, 
who, I am told, is their chosen leader, waves his 
dirty shirt in the face of the public in this fashion : 

"My shirt is a token and a symbol more than a cover from 

sun and rain, 
My shirt is a signal and a teller of souls, 
I can take off my shirt and tear it, and so make a ripping 

razzly noise, and the people will say, 'Look at him tear 

his shirt !' 

276 



SUNDOWN PAPERS 

" I can keep my shirt on, 
I can stick around and sing like a little bird, and look 'em 

all in the eye and never be fazed, 
I can keep my shirt on." 

Does not this resemble poetry about as much as 
a pile of dirty rags resembles silk or broadcloth? 
The trick of it seems to be to take flat, unimagina- 
tive prose and cut it up in lines of varying length, 
and often omit the capitals at the beginning of the 
lines — " shredded prose," with no " kick " in it 
at all. These men are the " Reds " of literature. 
They would reverse or destroy all the recognized 
rules and standards upon which literature is 
founded. They show what Bolshevism carried out 
in the field of poetry, would lead to. One of them 
who signs himself H. D. writes thus in the " Dial " 
on " Helios " : 

"Helios makes all things right — 
night brands and chokes, 
as if destruction broke 
over furze and stone and crop 
of myrtle-shoot and field-wort, 
destroyed with flakes of iron, 
the bracken-stone, 
where tender roots were sown 
blight, chaff, and wash 
of darkness to choke and drown. 

"A curious god to find, 
yet in the end faithful; 
bitter, the Kyprian's feet — 
ah, flecks of withered clay, 
great hero, vaunted lord — 
ah, petals, dust and windfall 
on the ground — queen awaiting queen." 

277 



THE LAST HARVEST 

What it all means — who can tell ? It is as empty 
of intelligent meaning as a rubbish-heap. Yet 
these men claim to get their charter from Whitman. 
I do not think Whitman would be enough inter- 
ested in them to feel contempt toward them. Whit- 
man was a man of tremendous personality, and 
every line he wrote had a meaning, and his whole 
work was suffused with a philosophy as was his 
body with blood. 

These Reds belong to the same class of inane sen- 
sationalists that the Cubists do; they would defy 
in verse what the Cubists defy in form. 

I have just been skimming through an illustrated 
book called " Noa Noa," by a Frenchman, which 
describes, or pretends to describe, a visit to Tahiti. 
There is not much fault to be found with it as a nar- 
rative, but the pictures of the natives are atrocious. 
Many of the figures are distorted, and all of them 
have a smutty look, as if they had been rubbed 
with lampblack or coal-dust. There is not one 
simple, honest presentation of the natural human 
form in the book. When the Parisian becomes a 
degenerate, he is the most degenerate of all — a 
refined, perfumed degenerate. A degenerate Eng- 
lishman may be brutal and coarse, but he could 
never be guilty of the inane or the outrageous 
things which the Cubists, the Imagists, the Fu- 
turists, and the other Ists among the French have 
turned out. The degenerate Frenchman is like 
278 



SUNDOWN PAPERS 

our species of smilax which looks fresh, shining, 
and attractive, but when it blooms gives out an 
odor of dead rats. 

I recently chanced upon the picture of a kneel- 
ing girl, by one of the Reds in art, a charcoal sketch 
apparently. It suggests the crude attempts of a 
child. The mouth is a black, smutty hole in the 
face, the eyes are not mates, and one of them is 
merely a black dot. In fact, the whole head 
seems thrust up into a cloud of charcoal dust. 
The partly nude body has not a mark of femininity. 
The body is very long and the legs very short, and 
the knees, as they protrude from under the drapery, 
look like two irregular blocks of wood. 

To falsify or belie nature seems to be the sole 
aim of these creatures. The best thing that could 
happen to the whole gang of them would be to be 
compelled to go out and dig and spade the earth. 
They would then see what things are really like. 

THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION 

It is interesting to note that the doctrine of evo- 
lution itself has undergone as complete an evolu- 
tion as has any animal species with which it deals. 
We find the germ of it, so to speak, in the early 
Greek philosophers and not much more. Crude, 
half-developed forms of it begin to appear in the 
eighteenth century of our era and become more 
and more developed in the nineteenth, till they 
279 



THE LAST HARVEST 

approximate completion in Darwin. In Geoff roy 
Saint-Hilaire in 1795 there are glimpses of the 
theory, but in Lamarck, near the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, the theory is so fully developed 
that it anticipates Darwin on many points ; often 
full of crudities and absurdities, yet Lamarck hits 
the mark surprisingly often. In 1813 Dr. W. C. 
Wells, an Englishman, read a paper before the 
Royal Society in London that contains a passage 
that might have come from the pages of Darwin. 
In the anonymous and famous volume called 
" Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844, the 
doctrine of the mutability of species is forcibly 
put. Then in Herbert Spencer in 1852 the evo- 
lution theory of development receives a fresh im- 
petus, till it matures in the minds of Darwin and 
Wallace in the late fifties. The inherent impulse 
toward development is also in Aristotle . It crops out 
again in Lamarck, but was repudiated by Darwin. 

FOLLOWING ONE'S BENT 

I have done what I most wanted to do in the world, 
what I was probably best fitted to do, not as the 
result of deliberate planning or calculation, but 
by simply going with the current, that is, follow- 
ing my natural bent, and refusing to run after 
false gods. Riches and fame and power, when 
directly pursued, are false gods. If a man delib- 
erately says to himself, " I will win these things," 
280 



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he has likely reckoned without his host. His host 
is the nature within and without him, and that 
may have something to say on the subject. But 
if he says, " I will do the worthy work that comes 
to my hand, the work that my character and my 
talent bring me, and I will do it the best I can," 
he will not reap a barren harvest. 

So many persons are disappointed in life ! They 
have had false aims. They have wanted some- 
thing for nothing. They have listened to the call 
of ambition and have not heeded the inner light. 
They have tried short cuts to fame and fortune, 
and have not been willing to pay the price in self- 
denial that all worthy success demands. We find 
our position in life according to the specific gravity 
of our moral and intellectual natures. 

NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OLD AGE l 

The physiology of old age is well understood — 
general sluggishness of all the functions, stiffness 
of the joints, more or less so-called rheumatism, loss 
of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing 
hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so 
on. But the psychology of old age is not so easily 
described. The old man reasons well, the judg- 
ment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert, 
the interest in life unabated. It is the memory 

1 [These fragments, which Mr. Burroughs intended to expand 
into an article, were among the very last things he wrote. — C. B.] 

281 



THE LAST HARVEST 

that plays the old man tricks. His mind is a 
storehouse of facts and incidents and experiences, 
but they do not hold together as they used to; 
their relations are broken and very uncertain. He 
remembers the name of a person, but perhaps can- 
not recall the face or presence; or he remembers 
the voice and presence, but without the name or 
face. He may go back to his school-days and try 
to restore the faded canvas of those distant days. 
It is like resurrecting the dead ; he exhumes them 
from their graves : There was G ; how dis- 
tinctly he recalls the name and some incident in his 

school life, and that is all. There was B , a 

name only. There was R , and the memory of 

the career he had marked out for himself and his 
untimely death through a steamboat accident ; but 
of his looks, his voice — not a vestige ! It is a 
memory full of holes, like a net with many of the 
meshes broken. He recalls his early teachers, some 
of them stand out vividly — voice, look, manner 
— all complete. Others are only names associated 
with certain incidents in school. 

Names and places with which one has been 
perfectly familiar all his life suddenly, for a few 
moments, mean nothing. It is as if the belt 
slipped, and the wheel did not go round. Then 
the next moment, away it goes again ! Or, shall 
we call it a kind of mental anaesthesia, or mental 
paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading 
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something about Georgetown, South America. 
I repeated the name over to myself a few times. 
" Have I not known such a place some time in my 
life? Where is it? Georgetown? Georgetown?" 
The name seemed like a dream. Then I thought 
of Washington, the Capital, and the city above it, 
but had to ask a friend if the name was George- 
town. Then suddenly, as if some chemical had 
been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it 
came ! Of course it was Georgetown. How could 
I have been in doubt about it? (I had lived in 
Washington for ten years.) 

So we say, old age may reason well, but old age 
does not remember well. This is a commonplace. 
It seems as if memory were the most uncertain of 
all our faculties. 

Power of attention fails, which we so often mis- 
take for deafness in the old. It is the mind that 
is blunted and not the ear. Hence we octogena- 
rians so often ask for your question over again. 
We do not grasp it the first time. We do not want 
you to speak louder, we only need to focus upon 
you a little more completely. 

Of course both sight and hearing are a little 
blunted in old age. But for myself I see as well 
as ever I did, except that I have to use spectacles 
in reading; but nowadays the younger observers 
hear the finer sounds in nature that sometimes 
escape me. 

283 



THE LAST HARVEST 

Some men mellow with age, others harden, but 
the man who does not in some way ripen is in a 
bad way. Youth makes up in sap and push what 
it lacks in repose. 

To grow old gracefully is the trick. 

To me one of the worst things about old age is 
that one has outlived all his old friends. The Past 
becomes a cemetery. 

" As men grow old," said Rochefoucauld, 
" they grow more foolish and more wise " — wise 
in counsel, but foolish in conduct. " There is no 
fool like an old fool," said Tennyson, but it is 
equally true that there is no fool like the young 
fool. If you want calm and ripe wisdom, go to 
middle age. 

As an octogenarian, I have found it interesting 
to collate many wise sayings of many wise men on 
youth and age. 1 

Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of 
conversation. It is certainly true that in age we 
do find our tongues, if we have any. They are 
unloosed, and when the young or the middle-aged 
sit silent, the octogenarian is a fountain of conver- 
sation. In age one set of pleasures is gone and 
another takes its place. 

Emerson published his essay on " Old Age " 
while he was yet in the middle sixties, and I recall 

1 [Here followed several pages of quotations from the ancients 
and moderns. — C. B.] 

284 



SUNDOWN PAPERS 

that in the " Emerson-Carlyle Correspondence " 
both men began to complain of being old before 
they were sixty. Scott was old before his time, 
and Macaulay too. Scott died at sixty-one, Ma- 
caulay at fifty-nine, Tennyson at eighty-three, 
Carlyle at eighty-six, Emerson at seventy-nine, 
Amiel at sixty. 

I have heard it said that it is characteristic of 
old age to reverse its opinions and its likes and dis- 
likes. But it does not reverse them; it revises 
them. If its years have been well spent, it has 
reached a higher position from which to overlook 
life. It commands a wider view, and the relation 
of the parts to the whole is more clearly seen. . . . 

" Old age superbly rising " — Whitman. 

Age without decrepitude, or remorse, or fear, 
or hardness of heart ! 

FACING THE MYSTERY 

I wi)3H there were something to light up the grave 
for me, but there is not. It is the primal, unend- 
ing darkness. The faith of all the saints and mar- 
tyrs does not help me. I must see the light be- 
yond with my own eyes. Whitman's indomitable 
faith I admire, but cannot share. My torch will 
not kindle at his great flame. From our youth up 
our associations with the dead and with the grave 
are oppressive. Our natural animal instincts get 
the better of us. Death seems the great catas- 
285 



THE LAST HARVEST 

trophe. The silver cord is loosened, and the golden 
bowl is broken. The physical aspects of death 
are unlovely and repellent. And the spiritual 
aspects — only the elect can see them. Our phys- 
ical senses are so dominant, the visible world is so 
overpowering, that all else becomes as dreams and 
shadows. 

I know that I am a part of the great cosmic sys- 
tem of things, and that all the material and all 
the forces that make up my being are as indestructi- 
ble as the great Cosmos itself — all that is phys- 
ical must remain in some form. But conscious- 
ness, the real Me, is not physical, but an effect of 
the physical. It is really no more a thing than 
" a child's curlicue cut by a burnt stick in the 
night," and as the one is evanescent, why not the 
other ? 

Nature is so opulent, so indifferent to that we 
hold most precious, such a spendthrift, evokes such 
wonders from such simple materials ! Why should 
she conserve souls, when she has the original stuff 
of myriads of souls? She takes up, and she lays 
down. Her cycles of change, of life and death, go 
on forever. She does not lay up stores; she is, 
and has, all stores, whether she keep or whether 
she waste. It is all the same to her. There is no 
outside, no beyond, to her processes and posses- 
sions. There is no future for her, only an ever- 
lasting present. What is the very bloom and 
286 



SUNDOWN PAPERS 

fragrance of humanity to the Infinite? In the 
yesterday of geologic time, humanity was not. In 
the to-morrow of geologic time, it will not be. The 
very mountains might be made of souls, and all the 
stars of heaven kindled with souls, such is the 
wealth of Nature in what we deem so precious, and 
so indifferent is she to our standards of valuation. 
This I know, too : that the grave is not dark or 
cold to the dead, but only to the living. The light 
of the eye, the warmth of the body, still exist un- 
diminished in the universe, but in other relations, 
under other forms. Shall the flower complain 
because it fades and falls? It has to fall before 
the fruit can appear. But what is the fruit of the 
flower of human life? Surely not the grave, as 
the loose thinking of some seem to imply. The 
only fruit I can see is in fairer flowers, or a higher 
type of mind and life that follows in this world, 
and to which our lives may contribute. The flower 
of life has improved through the ages — the 
geologic ages ; from the flower of the brute, it has 
become the flower of the man. You and I perish, 
but something goes out, or may go out, from us 
that will help forward a higher type of mankind. 
To what end? Who knows? We cannot cross- 
question the Infinite. Something in the universe 
has eventuated in man, and something has profited 
by his ameliorations. We must regard him as a 
legitimate product, and we must look upon death 
287 



THE LAST HARVEST 

as a legitimate part of the great cycle — an evil 
only from our temporary and personal point of 
view, but a good from the point of view of the 
whole. 



THE END 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Adaptation, 247, 248. 

Agassiz, Louis, 163. 

Alchemy, 242, 243. 

Alcott, Amos Bronson, in Em- 
erson's Journals, 26-29; on 
Thoreau, 156. 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 253. 

Alphabet, the, 275, 276. 

American people, the, 252, 253. 

Amiel, Henri Frederic, 4-6; 
quoted, 223. 

Arnim, Elisabeth von, 34, 35. 

Arnold, Matthew, 213, 250, 
260; in Emerson's Journals, 
25; on Emerson, 87, 89, 90; 
his poetry, 209; on poetry, 
212. 

Art, recent "isms " in, 278, 279. 

Audacity, 261. 

Aurora borealis, 140, 141. 

Batavia Kill, 244. 

Beauty, 98-101, 246, 247, 251, 
252. 

Beecher, Henry Ward, 232. 

Bent, following one's, 280, 281. 

Benton, Myron, 26. 

Bergson, Henri, his "Creative 
Evolution," revised estimate 
of, 264-66; and telepathy, 
267, 268. 

Bettina, Goethe's, 34, 35. 

Bittern, pumping, 135. 

Boldness, 261. 

Bouton, Deborah, 244. 

Bryant, William Cullen, his 
poetry, 203, 204, 222. 

Burns, Robert, 213. 

Burroughs, John, chronic home- 
sickness, 227, 228. 



Cactus, 248. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 34, 35, 43, 
47, 97; contrasted with Em- 
erson, 30; correspondence 
with Emerson, 39, 40, 61, 80, 
81; on Webster, 61; as a 
painter, 76, 77; Emerson's 
love and admiration for, 79- 
82; his style, 82. 

Channing, William Ellery, 2d, 
138—40; in Emerson's Jour- 
nals, 9, 29, 30, 142; in Tho- 
reau's Journal, 149. 

City, the, 226, 227. 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, quot- 
ed, 276. 

Contrasts, 218-29. 

Country, life in the, 226-28. 

Critic, the professional, 259, 
260. 

Criticism, 260. 

D., H., quoted, 277. 

Dana, Richard Henry, his 
"Two Years before the 
Mast," 256-58. 

Dargan, Olive Tilford, quoted, 
201, 202. 

Darwin, Charles, criticism of 
his selection theories, 172- 
89, 193-98; his "Voyage of 
the Beagle," 189-93; his 
significance, 198-200. 

Days, memorable, 231. 

Death, thoughts on, 285-88. 

De Vries, Hugo, his mutation 
theory, 196, 197. 

Discovery, 223-25. 



Early and late, 230, 231. 



291 



INDEX 



Eating, 77-79. 

Edison, Thomas A., 243, 269. 

Electricity, 231. 

Emerson, Charles, 5. 

Emerson, Dr. Edward W., on 
Thoreau, 155, 156. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 136, 
214, 227, 239; Journals of, 
discussed, 1-85; a new esti- 
mate of, 1-4; and social in- 
tercourse, 6-8; self-reliance, 
8, 31, 32; poet and prophet 
of the moral ideal, 9-11; his 
lectures, 11, 12, 64, 65, 162; 
his supreme test of men, 12, 
13, 17; his "Days," 14; his 
"Humble-Bee," 14; "Each 
and All," 15; "Two Rivers," 
15, 16; on Poe, 16; on Whit- 
man's "Leaves of Grass," 
17; as a reader and a writer, 
17, 18; his main interests, 18; 
on Jesus as a Representative 
Man, 20; on Thoreau, 22, 23, 
141, 156, 157; and John Muir, 
23, 24; alertness, 24; on 
Matthew Arnold, 25; on 
Lowell, 25, 26; on Alcott, 
26-29; on Father Taylor, 
28, 29; occupied with the 
future, 30; his "Song of Na- 
ture," 30, 31; near and far, 
past and present, 31, 32; and 
human sympathy, 32, 33, 38, 
39; "Representative Men," 
33; attitude towards Whit- 
man, 34, 253; literary es- 
timates, 34, 35; on Words- 
worth, 36; correspondence 
with Carlyle, 39, 40; love of 
nature, 41-43; his book " Na- 
ture," 41, 43, 88, 89, 230; 
his "May-Day," 43; feel- 
ing for profanity and racy 
speech, 44-48; humor, 45- 
48; thoughts about God, 48- 
52; attitude towards science, 



52-60; on Webster, 60-63; 
religion, 63, 64 ; self-criticism, 
65-67 ;" Terminus, " 67 ; cath- 
olicity, 67-70; on the Bible, 
70; his selection of words, 70, 
71; ideas but no doctrines, 
71, 72; his limitations, 73- 
75; and Hawthorne, 73-75; 
a painter of ideas, 76, 77; on 
eating and the artist, 77 ; love 
and admiration for Carlyle, 
79-82; hungered for the 
quintessence of things, 84; 
the last result of Puritanism, 
85; an estimate of, 86-92; 
attitude towards poverty, 
89 ; weak in logic, 91 ; passion 
for analogy, 92; false notes 
in rhetoric, 92-94; speaking 
with authority, 95; at the 
Holmes breakfast, 95, 96; 
his face, 96; criticisms of, 96- 
101; on beauty, 98, 99; last 
words on, 102; compared 
with Thoreau, 126; inter- 
course with Thoreau, 156- 
58; incident related by Tho- 
reau, 158; on Walter Scott, 
216; on oratory, 232; a New 
England Thomas a Kempis, 
261; old age, 284, 285. 

Esopus, N.Y., 244. 

Ethical standards, 233. 

Everett, Edward, 223. 

Evolution, and the Darwinian 
theory, 174-89, 193-98; 
chance in, 175-81; the mu- 
tation theory, 196, 197; 
Bergson reread, 264-66; evo- 
lution of the doctrine, 279, 
280. 

Farm, the home, 227, 228. 

Fist, the, 220, 221. 

Flagg, Wilson, Thoreau on, 165, 

166. 
Flattery, 221, 222. 



INDEX 



Flowers, fadeless, 231. 
Fort Myers, 243. 
Fox, 135, 136. 
Fuller, Margaret, 7. 

Genius, and talent, 222, 223. 

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 280. 

Germans, the, 3, 4. 

Gilchrist, Anne, on Emerson, 
88. 

God, Emerson's idea of, 48-52; 
Nature's, 233, 234. 

Goethe, 98. 

Gray, Eri, 244. 

Gray, Thomas, his "Elegy 
written in a Country Church- 
yard," 216. 

Grossmont, Cal., 240. 

H. D., quoted, 277. 
Hawaiian Islands, 236. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, and 

Emerson, 73-75. 
Hearn, Lafcadio, quoted, 202. 
Heat, 246. 
Hermits, 244. 
Higginson, Thomas Went worth, 

253. 
History, the grand movements 

of, 249. 
Homesickness, 227-29. 
Howells, William Dean, 227; 

an estimate, 262, 263. 

Insects, hum of, 244, 245. 
Invention, 223-26. 

James, Henry, his hypersen- 

sitiveness, 255, 256. 
James, William, quoted, 234. 
Journals, 4, 5. 
Juvenal, quoted, 242. 

Keator, Ike, 244. 
Kepler, Johann, quoted, 254. 
Kidd, Benjamin, his "Social 
Evolution," 270. 



Kingsley, Charles, a parable of, 

189; and Newman, 261. 
Knowledge, the Tree of, 248. 

Lamarck, 280. 

Landor, Walter Savage, Em- 
erson and, 34, 35, 43. 

Life, the result of a system of 
checks and counter-checks, 
236, 237. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 220, 221, 
223. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 
in Emerson's Journals, 25. 

Loveman, Robert, his poetry, 
204, 205; quoted, 204, 205. 

Lowell, James Russell, in Em- 
erson's Journals, 25; criti- 
cism of Thoreau, 104-11; 
love of books and of nature, 
110, 111; possessed talent 
but not genius, 223; and 
Whitman, 253. 

McCarthy, John Russell, his 

poems, 204, 208, 223; quoted, 

214, 215, 223. 
Masefield, John, 208. 
Maui, 236. 
Meteoric men, 231, 232, 270- 

72. 
Milton, John, "Paradise Lost," 

260; quoted, 260. 
Montaigne, 8. 
Moody, William Vaughn, his 

poetry, 204-07; quoted, 207. 
Morgan, Thomas Hunt, on 

Darwin, 200. 
Movements, in inert matter, 

245. 
Muir, John, 23. 
Mutation theory, 196, 197. 

Natural history, and ethical 
and poetic values, 54-56. 

Natural selection, criticism of 
the theory, 178-89, 193-98. 



£93 



INDEX 



Newspapers, 272-74. 
"Noa Noa," 278. 

Old age, the psychology of, 

281-85. 
Oratory, 232, 233. 
Osborn, Henry Fairfield, on 

chance in evolution, 175. 

Palm and fist, 220, 221. 

Pascal, Blaise, quoted, 233. 

Permanent, and transient, 218, 
219. 

Phillips, Stephen, 270. 

Phillips, Wendell, 222, 232; 
quoted, 221. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 203; Emer- 
son on, 16, 74; his poetry, 
209-11. 

Poets, do not efface one an- 
other, 250, 251. 

Poetry, only the best signifi- 
cant, 201; a discussion of, 
201-17; B.'s own, 203; and 
philosophy, 203, 204, 207- 
09, 260; not sweetened prose 
put up in verse form, 207; 
red revolution in, 276-78. 

Pope, Alexander, 201. 

Positive and negative, 219, 220. 

Power, mankind drunk with, 
248, 249. 

Praise, and flattery, 221, 222. 

Prayer, 233. 

Quotations, a book of, 261, 262. 

Rain, creative function of, 236. 
Rainbow, the, 137, 138. 
Rashness, 261. 
Reds of literature and art, the, 

276-79. 
Reed, Sampson, 34, 35. 
Rhyme, 267. 

Ripley, Rev. Dr. Ezra, 45, 46. 
Robertson, Frederick William, 

232. 



Rochefoucauld, quoted, 284. 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 220, 259, 

272. 
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 179. 

Sandburg, Carl, quoted, 276, 

277. 
Santayana, George, quoted, 

260. 
Scott, Sir Walter, his poems, 

216. 
Sea, the, 218. 
Sect, a queer, 243. 
Sexes, the, 238-10. 
Shakespeare, William, quoted, 

242. 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 74. 
Sidney, Sir Philip, quoted, 267. 
Smith, Alexander, 270. 
Snake, mechanism for crushing 

eggs, 196. 
Snow, 252. 

Spanish-American War, 206. 
Spencer, Herbert, 280. 
Spiritualism, 267-69. 
Stanton, Edwin M., 221. 
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 

253. 
Style, 81-84, 256. 
Sublime, the, 251. 
Swift, Jonathan, 93, 267; quot- 
ed, 223. 
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 

209, 254. 

Talent, and genius, 222, 223. 

Taylor, Edward T., 28, 29, 85. 

Telepathy, 267-69. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 41, 209, 250; 
and Whitman, 254. 

Theories, absurd, 242, 243. 

Thomas a Kempis, 261; quot- 
ed, 261. 

Thomson, J. Arthur, 96. 

Thoreau, Henry D., Journal of, 
4, 5; in Emerson's Journals, 
20, 29; compared with Em- 



294 



INDEX 



erson, 20-22; his "Walden," 
21; "The Maine Woods," 
21, 22; "Cape Cod," 22; 
Emerson on, 22, 23; false 
notes in rhetoric, 03 ; does not 
grow stale, 103; ancestry, 
104; Lowell's criticism of, 
104-11; industry, 106; phi- 
losophy and life, 108; ac- 
complishment, 109, 110; his 
" Walden," 110, 143, 147; hu- 
mor, 110; approving of Whit- 
man, 111, 112; as a nature 
writer, 112-20; his Journal 
quoted and criticized, 113, 
128, 134-37, 139-61, 163-65, 
169, 170; "Walden" quoted, 
114-19, 137, 143, 146, 147; 
travels, 119, 120; unique- 
ness, 120, 121; and science, 
122; individualism, 122, 123; 
an extremist, 123, 124; and 
civilization, 124, 125; com- 
pared with Emerson, 126; 
as a walker, 127-32; his 
"Walking," 127-29; his nat- 
ural-history lore, 133-41; 
faults as a writer, 141-46; 
love of writing, 150; literary 
activity, 153- 55; personality, 
155-59; and the Civil War, 
159, 160; and John Brown, 
160; inconsistencies, 160-62, 
166; his "Life without Prin- 
ciple," 162; idealism, 162- 
68; manual labor, 163-65; 
moralizing on Bill Wheeler, 
167, 168; and human emo- 
tions, 168; and young wo- 
men, 168, 169; as a philoso- 
pher, 169, 170; merits as a 
man and a writer, 170, 171; 
quoted, 242. 

Time, 241, 242. 

Timeliness, 230, 231. 

Torrey, Bradford, 134, 163. 

Town and country, 226-28. 



Transient, and permanent, 218, 

219. 
Truth, 234, 235, 247. 

Verse, free, 276-78. 

Very, Jones, in Emerson's 

Journals, 9, 25; Emerson's 

high opinion of, 35. 
"Vestiges of Creation," 280. 
Views, from mountain-tops, 

240, 241. 
Virgil, quoted, 242. 

Walking, 127-32. 

Warbler, night, Thoreau's, 136. 

Wealth, 237, 238. 

Webster, Daniel, Emerson on, 
60-63; Carlyleon, 61. 

Weismann, August, 178. 

Wells, Dr. W. C, 280. 

Whitman, Walt, 94, 222, 227, 
253, 278; Emerson on 
"Leaves of Grass," 17; in 
Emerson's Journals, 25; Em- 
erson's attitude towards, 34; 
receives "May-Day" from 
Emerson, 43; quoted, 100, 
179, 202, 212, 250, 251, 254, 
285; Thoreau's approval of, 
111, 112; his philosophy, 
208, 209; as a criterion, 253, 
254; his faith in himself, 254. 

Whitticr, John G., 92, 93; and 
Whitman, 253. 

Wilkinson, Garth, 35. 

Wilson, Woodrow, 221, 232. 271. 

Winter, William, 253. 

Women, 238-40. 

Words, and style, 83, 84. 

Wordsworth, William, 216, 250, 
251; PJmerson's estimate of, 
36; quoted, 100, 218; a poet- 
walker, 130, 131; on poetry 
and philosophy, 203; great 
only at rare intervals, 212, 
213. 

Wren, cactus, 248. 






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